Painting Fakes

Talk about turning a negative into a positive.  Ray Smith , the Labor candidate to become Brisbane's Lord Mayor next year, just had a flyer delivered to my letter box.  First of all he tells us this. Everywhere I go people are telling me they're fed up with costly toll tunnels that nobody uses.  Council isn't solving our traffic problems.  Despite all the wasted money, traffic is worse than ever. Fair enough, but later on he tells us why we should vote for him. My background is in business - I'm not a career politician.  I haven't sat around in Council for over 20 years like my opponent, instead 20 years ago I started a small business working for myself.  Today that business employs over 150 highly skilled locals. In other words, unlike Graham Quirk, the long-standing Councillor who recently inherited the Lord Mayor's job when Campbell Newman stepped down to make his tilt at becoming president of Queensland , Ray Smith has no relevant experience.  Whil

I was generally a bit lukewarm about John Dickson's A Spectator's Guide to Jesus.   However, he did say something at got my attention. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" is one of those biblical phrases that has made its way into our wider culture.  This means that it is often taken out of its context, even by Christians.  Whenever I have heard a sermon or a discussion on this verse, it is taken to mean something like, "what's the point of riches and power if you are going to end up in hell?  It's better to believe in Jesus even if that means giving up these things."  There is of course a certain amount of truth in this but there is much more to the story than that. Here is the full passage it comes from, Mark 8:27-38 taken from the New International Version rather than the King James that you will most often hear quoted or misquoted. 27 Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages ar

After the hilarious foolishness of Stephan Huller  it's kind of calming to read a book about Jesus as sensible as John Dickson's A Spectator's Guide to Jesus: and introduction to the man from Nazareth. John Dickson  is a theologian and ancient historian, co-director of the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney, and has a shadow life as a gospel singer.  He is representative of the sort of moderate evangelicalism that permeates the Anglican church and many other mainstream protestant denominations here in Australia.  It would be hard to imagine a more orthodox commentator on the life of Jesus. The first thing that stands out about Dickson, more than any other writer I have read on the Life of Jesus , is his transparency about his sources.  Indeed there is a 100-page companion volume to A Spectator's Guide entitled The Christ Files which provides a handy summary of the various ancient sources - both Christian and non-Christian - for the life of Jesus.  He is also

While writing my earlier reviews of the Lives of Jesus, I realised that my reading was getting a little dated - almost nothing after 1995.  So it's time to do something about that - starting with Stephan Huller's The Real Messiah: The Throne of St Mark and the True Origins of Christianity. Apart from the title, two things about this book let us know immediately that we are reading a work of pseudo-history.  The first is the biographical note, which informs us that after graduating with a degree in philosophy, Huller pursued a career in the circus.  The second is the point on Page 2 where he cites The Da Vinci Code as evidence of a groundswell of awareness that something is wrong with the traditional view of Christianity. The rest of the book does not disappoint.  All the tricks of the pseudohistorical trade are here - characters with multiple names, coded messages, fortuitous discoveries of previously hidden evidence, and of course the inevitable Catholic cover-up.  Along

The following is a slightly edited version of a letter I sent to my local member and copied to Ms Gillard and Immigration Minister Chris Bowen. The recent High Court decision preventing the government from sending recent boat arrivals to Malaysia is a good opportunity for your government to rethink your approach to asylum seekers. It’s time to accept that the policy of mandatory detention is an expensive failure. In the two decades in which it has been in place, it has done nothing to stop boat arrivals. At the same time it has a massive cost in a number of different ways. It is costly financially – I understand it costs around $1b per year to manage Australia ’s current asylum seeker system, with the majority of this funding the detention centres. That would pay for a lot of resettlement services! It is costly in human terms, in the trauma inflicted on the detainees themselves, particularly as centres become more crowded and longer term detainees become more

I have heard that while authors provide the content for their books, publishers choose the titles.  Karen Armstrong's The Case for God might be an example of this.  The title sounds like she is defending God against atheism.  In fact, the book has a good deal to say about religion, not much about atheism (although the advent of atheism is clearly part of its context) and is fairly ambivalent about the word "God". Karen Armstrong  has written widely on religious subjects and has a strong bent for comparative religion.  After a stint in a Catholic religious order as a young adult, she initially abandoned faith altogether before coming back to a more open and inclusive spirituality, embracing lessons and practices from a variety of sources in a manner reminiscent of Joseph Campbell . The Case for God   covers similar territory to Alister McGrath's   The Twilight of Atheism , but it both travels back further and delves more deeply into the religious background to th

Lois and I went to see the new movie version of Jane Eyre for my birthday.  I don't need to provide a spoiler alert, do I? What a good movie adaptation will do for a classic story - and this is a good one - is to strip away a lot of the incidental details and show the skeleton of the story in sharp relief.  What we see is a story that, while never losing its focus on Jane as its heart, is structured around two interlocking love triangles. If there is a more spiritually charged set of love triangles in English literature then I can't recall it.  What is at stake here is not mere romance, or fortune, but people's souls. Jane lives through hard times before finally arriving at Thornfield House as a governess and falling in love with her master, Edward Rochester.  Although strange, and set against the background of creaky gothic horror, the romance seems set to end happily until the inevitable romance-tale hiatus.  Edward is already married to poor mad Bertha, the s

Recently my local paper featured a story about the Lifeline shop in our local shopping centre, finally re-opening after the January flood .  They were glad to be open again, but struggling for volunteers, and hoped that the community spirit that got us through the flood would bring them more volunteers. I've got some bad news for them.  The spirit of the floods will not continue.  People behave differently in an emergency.  There's normal life, and then there's what you do in a time of crisis. To some extent, this is sad.  The willingness of Brisbane people to help complete strangers back in January was one of the best things that's happened here in years, even as the flood itself was one of the worst.  The fact that we are now back to our normal routine - neither particularly good nor particularly evil - is a bit of a let-down. On the other hand, emergency behaviour is unpredictable.  We recently read stories from London of ordinary middle class young people loot

Fellow blogger Brad posted this interesting rave about cross generational computer skills, in which he refers to the technologically illiterate baby boomers and the current generation who have such easy to use technology that it requires no knowledge.  The the most tech capable people are therefore sandwiched between these two generations. Anyway, this story popped into my head and I popped it into his comments box, but I liked it so thought I'd post it here too.  My depression/war generation Dad was one of the early users of computers in Brisbane.  He was an electrical engineer who designed giant transformers (the sort that convert electrical current, not the ones that turn into fighting robots).  In the late 1960s he used to go into the Computer Centre in the city and get them to put cards through their huge machines to work out complex equations for him. I didn't inherit any of his technological skills so I became a social worker and only started using computers w

2 Timothy 3:16-17 is one of those snippets of scripture you get taught to memorise when you're a young evangelical.  I haven't read it for a while but it formed part of our readings on Sunday morning and it struck me that I had learnt it without thinking clearly about what it means.  Now's my chance to make up for that lack.  Here's the passage. 14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work . We were taught that this verse was a key indication that we should believe the Bible in its entirety.  It was often combined with a passing reference in 2 Peter 3:16

What do the English riots and social problems in remote Australian Aboriginal communities have in common?  Well, there are probably a few things but one of them is that they have brought both critics and defenders of the welfare state to the fore.   For the defenders, the riots are a protest against the welfare cuts of the new Tory Government.  They are an overflow of the stress of poverty exacerbated by the fear of lost entitlements.  For the critics, on the other hand, these generous welfare measures are part of the problem.  They encourage people to think that the world owes them a living, and enculturate them into a "something for nothing" mentality which disempowers them and disengages them from society. This same debate has been going on for years in Australia, particularly focused around the problems of Aboriginal communities.  Noel Pearson, a prominent Aboriginal leader from Cape York, has long been a critic of the welfare state, seeing it as destroying the ini

I've been listening to The Doors for the first time.  Really listening, I mean.  I've known of their music for years, had a tape or two in my collection, had them playing as I drove or read.  In fact it's hard to avoid them if you sometimes listen to the radio, or have neighbours who do.  They're one of those ubiquitous bits of our popular culture.  Yet this is the first time I've really set myself to listen properly.  Let me tell you, it's not for the fainthearted. The Doors were formed in 1966 and burst onto public consciousness in 1967 with their self-titled first album.  Four years, seven albums and untold quantities of alcohol and narcotics later, it ended with Jim Morrison dead in a Paris hotel room.  The other three band members - keyboard player Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robbie Krieger and drummmer John Densmore - tried to continue but most of the creative spark departed with Morrison, singer, chief lyricist and creator of stage mayhem. The band&