Painting Fakes

When I wrote about the conservative Christian response to same-sex relationships  a couple of weeks ago, I talked about how many Christians approach the Bible, including the New Testament, with a legalistic mindset. By this I don't mean that they have a strict morality.  The equation of legalism with strictness is a mistake, as is the equation of non-legalistic morality with laxity.  What I mean is that people with a legalistic mindset see morality as a set of rules which must be obeyed.  Our ethical task is to interpret those rules correctly and then follow them. I have suggested plenty of times in this blog that this is not Jesus' view of morality nor that of his apostles.  Jesus taught that the whole law and the prophets could be summed up in two commandments - love God and love your neighbour.  This is often called "golden rule" morality - "do to others as you would like them to do to you". A few years ago I had a go at summarising this view in two

So, apparently we're having a national conversation about tax reform.  Governments do this every so often.  It used to be called "consultation". Such a "conversation" sounds like a really good idea.  I imagine that we would get tax experts to analyse our tax system and tell us how it is going now, what's good and bad about it and what options there are for us to improve it.  We could then get non-experts to translate this into terms ordinary people could understand, and there could be various ways for people to have input - web forums, face to face meetings, formal submission processes.  Then the government would narrow this down to its preferred options and see what reaction they get, before modifying and implementing. Of course I have a fertile imagination.  Actually it's nothing like that. Not that some people don't try.  The current government released a Tax White Paper last year called "Re:Think" and there are various plain-Engl

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about Paul Watzlawick et al's Change  and the idea of first and second order change.  The idea has kept on being useful since I remembered it, so recently I got my hands on a copy of the book to read it again.  Along with it I also bought a book by Watzlawick called Ultra-Solutions: How to fail most successfully. This little booklet is an exploration of the kind of solution which "not only does away with the problem, but also with just about everything else, somewhat in the vein of the old medical joke - operation successful, patient dead...".  It is a light-hearted romp through the pitfalls of rigid or inadequate thinking, using as its framework the witches and their mistress Hecate who tempted Macbeth, and who continue to tempt us in our day to adopt strategies just as seductive and self-defeating as that followed by Shakespeare's tragic hero. In each short chapter he deals with a mental pitfall. The search for security and

Traditionally-oriented Christians are often portrayed as homophobic because of their opposition to same sex marriage and the various things that go with it. While it's true that there are some Christians who really think that "God hates fags", in my experience they are relatively few.  Most of the conservative Christians I know, and most of the conservative Christian writings I've read on the subject, are quite clear that God loves LGBTI people as much as he loves anyone else.  They will also tell you, if you ask, that same-sex relationships or encounters are not in a special category of sin - they are no more evil than, say, heterosexual adultery or stealing. However, after saying all these nice, loving things and providing an assurance of God's love, acceptance and forgiveness they will be immovable on one thing.  A same sex relationship, they will tell you, cannot possibly be right.  While there are lots of wrong ways to do heterosexual relationships there is

It can take me a long time to get around to reading a book.  There are so many of them in the world.  Sometimes it takes something extra to prompt me to pick up something.  Hence, the current moral panic about Islam, and my various bits of reading on the subject, finally got me to reading Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses . Salman Rushdie was born in Mumbai into a culturally Muslim but not particularly devout  Kashmiri family, and describes himself as an atheist.  He was educated in the UK and has spent most of his adult life there, working as an advertising copywriter before his second novel, Midnight's Children,  won the Booker Prize and allowed him to become a full-time novelist.   The Satanic Verses  is his fourth novel, published in 1988. Its publication set off a storm of protest from Islamic fundamentalists around the world.  Copies of the book were burned in the streets in various countries including the UK and US, bookstores that stocked it were picketed and even

Amidst last year's retirements of numerous high-profile Australian cricketers, not to mention today's announcement from West Indies great Shivnarine Chanderpaul, it would be easy to miss Nathan Hauritz's retirement anouncement. Hauritz could well have a productive second career as part of the answer to one of Australia's most difficult sports trivia questions: name the spin bowlers who have played Test cricket for Australia since Shane Warne's 2007 retirement. Any casual cricket watcher would get Nathan Lyon, who recently became Australia's most prolific Test offspinner.  Most would also get Stuart MacGill, the world class leg-spinner who spent his whole career in Warne's shadow.  How would you go with the rest?  Brad Hogg, Beau Casson, Cameron White, Jason Krezja, Bryce McGain, Xavier Doherty, Michael Beer, Steven Smith, Glenn Maxwell, Ashton Agar, Steven O'Keeffe.  And Nathan Hauritz. It is hardly a roll-call of glory.  Why is that a country whi

One of the mistakes we make as Westerners is that if we want to know what Muslims think, we go and read the Q'uran.  Not that I think we shouldn't read it - we really should - but we shouldn't assume that once we have read it we know how Muslims think.  What's to say they interpret it the same way we do?  What's to say they emphasise the bits that stand out to us? Of course the question "what do Muslims think?" is highly simplistic.  There are over 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, of all ages, a wide variety of nationalities, languages and cultures and widely differing levels of education.  Naturally they don't all think the same thing.  Still the obvious way to find out what Muslims think is to ask them. That's why I am surprised that in all the media I have been seeing on Islamic issues in the past few years, and the various bits of reading I've done, no-one has yet referred to Riaz Hassan's Inside Muslim Minds. Hassan is a South A

Cricket commentators around the world are asking, "can Test cricket survive?" They're particularly asking it here in Australia because we have just witnessed a soggy and depressing end to one of the least interesting Test series in history, played between Australia and a team of young men impersonating the West Indies.  Not many people turned up to watch, TV ratings were lukewarm and as one wit put it, by the third test even Mother Nature got bored and decided it was better to spend the time watering the grass. Meanwhile Australia's domestic cricketers, along with a fair number of actual West Indians and a smattering from other countries, have been playing T20 cricket in the Big Bash League in front of packed stadia and large TV audiences.  Even the women's version of the competition, in its very first year, is attracting enough interest for Channel 10 to increase its coverage. Of course threats to Test Cricket are not new.  In 1960, long before TV covera