tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48947640354394196562024-03-18T20:28:31.195-07:00Humble WonderfulNever stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.comBlogger176125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-10721732463759434142024-03-03T01:42:00.000-08:002024-03-06T20:02:03.463-08:00Return from Randomland<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoPBU2rZbgsEKCEgHGBlEzciQ9U6M-n0z9vNLSAoyoa0tkDdw0pM_impoL7OGpycdyMT9WFkIQL5xLYbQzpEia_7yMfjh1PuauufpYgJA7yiEnJX_LQ-3gTiuZPCN4en5sEYqpff2mKxexZzp0bhz39hOSbX6NpG9P9YXgjISq-l99oBWuVxkJ4j0UqPK-/s968/kirby_metronpainting.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="968" data-original-width="750" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoPBU2rZbgsEKCEgHGBlEzciQ9U6M-n0z9vNLSAoyoa0tkDdw0pM_impoL7OGpycdyMT9WFkIQL5xLYbQzpEia_7yMfjh1PuauufpYgJA7yiEnJX_LQ-3gTiuZPCN4en5sEYqpff2mKxexZzp0bhz39hOSbX6NpG9P9YXgjISq-l99oBWuVxkJ4j0UqPK-/s320/kirby_metronpainting.jpg" width="248" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Credit: Jack Kirby</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>It had long been considered a verifiable fact, that randomness was merely a god of the gaps, in a strictly determinist universe. This had been evidenced by how often randomness as an explanatory power had been defeated simply by gaining knowledge of previously unknown factors. Enough defeats and randomness was dead.</p><p>But then it was discovered that black holes produced random energy and fed it into this universe. Black Holes were not merely one way portals. They were like sinkholes where organised rule-obeying matter and energy are sucked away while chaotic random energy bubbles up.</p><p>It was concluded, after much debate and over so many, fallen, alternative theories, that it is not only knowledge that tames randomness in our universe, not merely the improvement of data that pushes randomness back, but in fact this universe itself. Our universe was self-ordering with a very low tolerance for casually disconnected events. Hence almost instantaneously what randomly comes in through Black holes loses that randomness and perhaps the inverse happen to what goes where black holes lead. The new settled fact became that our universe exists in symbiotic or parasitic or who can say what sort of relationship, with other universes that are more random. Perhaps even one which was completely random.</p><p>Most left it there, as an interesting research paper topic. Myles did not. They could not stop imagining a completely random universe. It was the only interesting scientific question in the world, in their mind. They dreamt about it. Their best friend encouraged their passion. They had not seen Myles this excited in a while.</p><p>So Myles built a machine, and they built a suit, and they stepped into it and they disappeared. And nobody could say whether they had simply stopped being altogether or whether the suit had worked and they were alive in a random universe or whether the suit had not worked but they were still somehow alive in a completely random universe. No one could say what would actually happen to a person who stepped into the machine. But several agreed that the maths checked out.</p><p>Myle's colleagues hid the machine away so that nobody would do anything terrible with it. Until one day, Myles returned. They were randomly changed, with random energy flowing through their body. And their decisions were able to navigate our world in ways people struggled to understand. A whole field hospital was built for Myles treatment and study. </p><p>Scientists gathered outside in their thousands waiting for Myles first interview. Drones flew over the hospital, broadcasting images to a world newly catholicised, waiting for their Pope. Those first words are yet to be understood if there even is any sense to recover from them. Over weeks Myles was able to order their actions enough to speak in response to a question, but “word diamonds window butterflies swarming” is to date their most coherent sentence.</p><p>The world found new ways to divide into those who think we should decipher Myles speech now as if it possesses some internal logic or whether we must simply wait for a logical sentence to come and those who don’t care either way and those who think caring about this question is the most important thing you can do. Myles recovery remained newsworthy for almost two months but there was never a satisfactorily robust discussion of the physics for some. Our general societal disregard for the theoretical sciences and the impact this has on funding came up, which predictably led to more people switching off.</p><p>Voices were raised that "Anything Myles has to say can't lower the cost of living or repair the environment anyway." Those two existential threats continued to rise in perfect tandem, in the last pattern that we are allowed to consider random.</p><p>All of which is why it was sweet and probably for the best, that Myles loving partner, their best friend, eventually liberated Myles from hospital. The two are said to be exercising a greater tolerance for randomness on their holidays.</p><p><br /></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</p><span><a name='more'></a></span>Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-372543949783271932021-11-19T20:59:00.000-08:002021-11-19T20:59:44.524-08:00Hegel's Split.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnjmJFWaNVXDVwoDPQIdaw29RIVRGSnGOJX9Exmu1nQjEUJK-U1fiWnAxFq60tRPiJMGnx6fngAnHSxPUPmkFMvoJkJr7U5yN_vWZs3yucSliVQpIKSCqXwP-R6KigAq3Y3U3QgsjwEycI/s1200/hegel_360x450.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="627" data-original-width="1200" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnjmJFWaNVXDVwoDPQIdaw29RIVRGSnGOJX9Exmu1nQjEUJK-U1fiWnAxFq60tRPiJMGnx6fngAnHSxPUPmkFMvoJkJr7U5yN_vWZs3yucSliVQpIKSCqXwP-R6KigAq3Y3U3QgsjwEycI/w400-h209/hegel_360x450.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p>Are you a reasonable person? A faithful, humble and patient servant of reason? If so let me tell you about something that should delight you; a Hegelian split. We’ll wade through some philosophy to get there but I think it’s worth it.</p><p>Hegel was born in the Duchy of Württemberg a reformist hold out from Catholic France, in 1770 and died only 61 years later in Prussia having seen the rise and fall of Napoleon. In my opinion, Hegel is a far more influential philosopher than he is given credit for. Given that he is already super famous I’m making a bold claim here. I think a lot of the ideas of the 20th century across most of the world, both good and bad, can be traced back to his way of thinking. Marx for example called his ideas dialectical materialism and he got the dialectical part from Hegel. I’ll leave it to you to put Marx in the good or bad column.</p><p>Hegel’s dialectic is a type of reasoning. You might be thinking “there are types of reasoning? Well that’s no good.” because it does somewhat undermine reasons promise to discern truth, to think that two reasonable people mightn’t even follow the same process. Such is our human condition, I guess.</p><p>Moving quickly on from that grief, let’s remember what reasoning is. A lot of reasoning helps us determine between two mutually exclusive theories. Either the butler killed Mr. X or they didn’t. Either God exists or they don’t. Either the cheese toastie is healthy due to its calcium or the doctor was right and it’s mostly fats. This sort of reasoning produces conclusions from premises and those conclusions either must be right or must be wrong or if our reasoning is inconclusive may be right or wrong. Generally we use reasoning to sort ideas into those three boxes ; necessary, impossible or possible. A successful run of our internal reasoning program will complete this sorting process.</p><p>Hegel’s dialectic describes a process when two ideas that both contain some good and some error bash up against each other and what emerges is a new idea with the good from both and the error from neither. This process tends not to produce any sort of definitive answer. The old answers and the new answer are all called theses. The new thesis has it’s own errors revealed by the emergence of it’s own anti-thesis and the dialectical process continues.</p><p>Hegel saw this dialectical process as the process by which history occurs. Hegel also saw society in terms of ideas rather than individuals or even nations. For Hegel, Napoleon represented a set of ideas particularly about how society should be run and Napoleons’ real opposition was therefore other ideas about how society should be run. Through the dialectical process it was unlikely that one idea would crush all others with it’s absolute truth. Rather Hegel expected that society would vacillate between opposing ideas until it resolved that ideological conflict, probably by absorbing insights from both into a new concept and then history continues from a new floor so to speak.</p><p>A few things are worth noting. While Hegel was disillusioned by both the excesses of European Romanticism and Napoleons’ dictatorship he was still optimistic to the point of arrogance by today’s standards. As a citizen of reformed, enlightened Prussia, Hegel believed that his society was much further along the progress of ideas than that of “primitive” people around the world. Post World War 2, the rise of Stalin and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with human extinction a real possibility from climate change, it is a lot harder to have Hegel's upbeat view of human progress, especially one which views European society as superior to all others. Secondly, Hegel had no access to the ideas of evolution. Hegel’s idea of human progress was towards a transcendent truth that drew us towards it and the relative relativism of a society adapting to its conditions like an organism evolving, just wasn’t an idea Hegel would have contended with.</p><p>Thirdly, Hegel was pessimistic about our ability to use a dialectical method to predict or imagine the step beyond us. For Hegel, we stand in our time and place belonging to a certain set of ideas. The synthesis of our current ideas and their opposites is not available to us as a thought and certainly the dialectical outcome of that new concept and whatever anti-thesis to it that emerges is completely unfathomable to us. We might be able to guess that the next fashion trend will be a combination of small badges and large earrings or French-Korean fusion cuisine served in bamboo boxes but we’d mostly be lucky to get that right and what comes after that is anyone’s guess. Hegel was not a futurist, rather he thought the sole purpose of the dialectical process was to uncover the past history of ideas. By using the Hegelian split, a good natural philosopher, could uncover the ideas of the past that produced our own.</p><p>A Hegelian split is a division of an idea so perfect that everything on one side of the cleave is on that side and everything else is on the other side. I wonder if you are thinking, “That’s nothing special.” and I really don’t know if I have the words to describe the sheer delight of a genuinely perfect cleave in the realm of ideas. Let’s look at the example of liberty as a political concept.</p><p>Freedom is a political idea that is banded about a lot. The people who demand freedom as a political good don’t usually mean total freedom. They might for example want the freedom to discriminate against others which impacts on those other people’s freedoms. Or they might want to be free to marry who they want but happy to obey the speed limits while driving. They might want to be free to smoke but able to compel doctors and nurses to treat them if they get sick. If we want to understand the type of thing they are talking about and that we ourselves might mean by freedom we can separate the idea into two competing opposites.</p><p>On the one hand there is total absolute freedom. On the other hand there is restraint, control and regulation. The freedom that people demand in our politics is a synthesis of these two ideas; a sort of freedom that incorporates a level of restraint that is itself regulated and subject to correction. This isn’t to say that everyone is arguing from this synthesised idea of freedom. Some people generally might mean that they want zero restraint while others might want for a system where those in control are never questioned. But if we want to have a more sophisticated conversation about the freedom most people are talking about we need to see it in the dialectical process from which it emerges and we do that by uncovering its preceding ideological opposites.</p><p>When we make a Hegelian split we end up with everything on one side or another. Lots of distinctions are much more messy than that. European and U.S. culture is not a neat split. A character like Charlie Chaplin’s hobo is both quintessentially U.S. and arguably French in every way but geographically. Talking in terms of European and American cultures will throw up numerous messy overlaps like trying to cut a pizza so that one slice only has ham and the other only pineapple. We can name this “a shitty distinction” and point out how a phenomenon may lie across this distinction rendering it useless in its regard. Hegel encourages us to keep looking for the better distinction.</p><p>I am not entirely sure Hegelian splits are real things. They live in the realm of ideas and belong to a model of history that has it’s own robust anti-thesis at it’s throat. One thing I desperately want to express is the intellectual pleasure of them. For that I should probably just link to similar pleasures like <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Perfectfit/comments/qwxe0l/perfect_fit/" target="_blank">watching things perfectly fit</a>. Or if you want to know what I think a perfect Hegelian split audibly sounds like then enjoy Wu Tang Clans’ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJk0p-98Xzc" target="_blank">Da Mystery of Chess Boxing</a>. You don’t have to own an authentic katana to know what I am talking about but I do think anyone who does will be nodding at this point.</p><p>The other point I want to mention is that by making this perfect split so central to doing philosophy and history well, Hegel does something very important. Hegel values precision of language. In a way this is a critique of all reason because precision of language is not simply present or not present. Instead we are only ever more or less precise. To speak in idioms, precision is an art rather than a science. (What a shitty distinction that is by the way; art and science.) We feel pleasure when we achieve some measure of precision and we lack that pleasure when our distinctions are sloppy and incomplete but solving a lack of precise language is not something that running a logical program in our heads can overcome. We may even lack the words in our current language. The frustration this creates only amplifies the sweetness when we find or coin the words to make the slice perfectly.<br /><br />Full confession; I'm not a Hegelian scholar. This blog post draws on vague recollections of having read very little of Hegel's writings and other people's descriptions of his ideas. I may have misrepresented him terribly and I'd appreciate comments that describe his ideas differently. Googling Hegelian split doesn't indicate anyone else on the internet using the term. I didn't invent it just for this blog post though. It's a concept that I have valued, rightly or wrongly as Hegel's, for a very long time.</p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
<br />
<br />
</p>Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-71846148614343783602021-11-14T17:03:00.002-08:002021-11-14T18:38:01.500-08:00Who's winning?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKiYK7Ozr70xYkUMi5Q6HEVGhRBW_WfEeAWhex3UZK9v_UsbwcEAKx6oZdmHXS7HmLxqYMwx5JRPyUE0xCzm3BXIWqrksnJiNFkAQeX2-QEXSQz5oQ5feECLvghTkhUEhpXewooJ2eaqdc/s799/culturewar.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="A poster with Culture War in large font rests against a wall, promoting an event people are lining up for." border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="799" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKiYK7Ozr70xYkUMi5Q6HEVGhRBW_WfEeAWhex3UZK9v_UsbwcEAKx6oZdmHXS7HmLxqYMwx5JRPyUE0xCzm3BXIWqrksnJiNFkAQeX2-QEXSQz5oQ5feECLvghTkhUEhpXewooJ2eaqdc/w393-h261/culturewar.jpg" width="393" /></a></div><br /><p>I am on Facebook. If you are not I suspect you have much more of your humanity intact than I do and I don’t want to encourage anyone to follow me into the beast. I mention this merely to lead into how one page I subscribe to on Facebook is titled “We have murdered satire and sit on it’s throne”. It’s a repository for news mostly from the U.S., that sounds like it should be satire but isn’t. Often these are reports of obvious racism or homophobia. The sentiment is very “If I saw this in a script it would be unbelievable but here it is and yet they tell you there’s no white or straight privilege anymore.” Commentators on these stories have been trending more and more over it and angry and less just smug face-palming. Why wouldn’t they when, just like me, their Facebook feed is full of how people often motivated by fundamentalist religion and self-entitlement are making life drastically worse?</p><p>An example of the sort of articles featured on this page include the decision by a Virginia school board to remove LGBTIA books from public school libraries. The boards greatest outrage is reserved for a book which they say promotes a relationship between an adult male and a teenage boy. That refers to “All about me” in which the author recounts how at 17 they had a brief relationship with a 24 year old boarder at his fathers house in 1980’s Italy. I haven’t read it but the reviews are great. Saying it promotes what sounds like pedophilia is like saying the gospels promote divine child rape because Mary is barely 15. More importantly though, “why do I care?”. I’m not Virginian. Sure I’m angry about censorship of 1980's closeted queer experiences but it’s fair to say I do seem to be wolfing down that rage with a spoon if I have to go to Virginia, U.S. to find it. It’s just, you know, these conservative Christians seem to be raising their blood soaked crosses everywhere. Poland is even worse. So my “research” tells me.</p><p>Meanwhile the winner of the Australian Christian book of the year award in 2021 (you can evaluate its bona fides for yourself here) is a book about how Christians face oppression and exclusion in official and unofficial ways across what once was Christendom. It’s a sermon preached to the choir because increasingly Christians who are plugged into the conservative and evangelical media sphere are convinced that they are the ones on the back foot. The sort of phrasing you can find from the winning author, Stephen McAlpine, is that the “sexular culture” is “hunting” for them. This same culture that is getting its books banned in Virginia, U.S., is actually more commonly, prosecuting and punishing everyday Christians who express doubt about our post hetero-sexist social norms. While the Australian federal government still preserves religious chaplains in public schools this can only be a stop gap measure until working in public schools requires an acceptance of gender diversity and homosexuality at odds with Christianity. That is the overwhelming direction of culture the book illustrates.</p><p>This world view is reinforced once you enter the worlds of right wing facebook and twitter. Orthodox Christians are cautioned not to think they can maintain a private faith quietly. Publicly they should expect to be fired without recourse from an increasingly “woke” world. Those against them are called “elites”, “cultured despisers” or some other handy pejorative that inflates their power. Politicians suggest that just calling yourself a Christian is under threat from these apparatchiks. The LGBTIA movement in particular is a monolithic monster that knows no limits and can’t be trusted on any level. Christians who question these statements are accommodating the culture. They are collaborators and suckers.</p><p>Even if we accept that some of this is a propaganda war we desperately want to know who is actually winning. Is it the Queer movement? Is it Conservative Christianity? Who is the oppressor? Who is the underdog? Each side fearing no mercy from the other makes a pre-emptive strike against the others freedoms. That strike is held up as proof of how horrible they are by their opponents justifying an overreach in return. I wonder if the people in Virginia sat down to read about the politician in Finland who has been investigated for hate speech for traditional Christian views about sexuality before they return voted to ban gay books. News that confirms our biases is not limited by mere geography for either side. Your favourite site will hoover it all up for you and leave contradictory evidence behind. I honestly believe, without wanting to suggest that these are not important issues, that this is how they are getting us to ignore climate change. This culture war is the preferred topic for elections by the true moneyed elites.</p><p>I had a go at disrupting this march to war. I held a talk at my church (my old church I guess) about Queer History. It was both an unfortunate and a wonderful experience. I had someone come to my house pretending to represent more official consensus than they did, to make sure it wasn’t promoted beyond the church and to stress their discomfort if anyone who wasn’t an adult came. I still hear in my head how others let that happen because the topic was “fraught” after all. Fraught was where I thought we walked. It has shattered my illusion that this church is non-hierarchical or even that it can put listening for God before the churches inter-church reputation. This is hard for both sides. Christians judge Christians as queers judge queers, who are soft on the enemy. Am I this churches enemy? Are they mine? I did not think so.</p><p>I’ve let covid lockdowns give me the excuse to stay away from church. It had stopped being a place I could go with my guard down and started being just one more cultural battlefield. I guess despite all the good works it does, it didn’t feel like God was there. Or it felt like it was going to be harder work than I thought to find God there. Maybe it was fraught work? Maybe I also don’t really do fraught. Facebook doesn’t ask me to that’s for sure. There I never have to see any indication of my sides power and every indication that we are the true rebel alliance.</p><p>The Queer / Conservative Christian conflict is not the only space this is happening in. I have seen articles, and YouTube videos, in my Facebook feed that tell me Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial is rigged for him and against him. So, depending on what side your feed is on and the verdict, you will either be sure some racist cracker judge let a murderer off or that woke liberalism chose to ignore clear facts because it didn’t suit their narrative. Maybe one of those sides is true and needs to be told in which case not paying attention is a moral crime. Maybe both are true and false equally and the deeper truth is we are all being played, in which case not paying attention is the only righteous act. Probably something is true but its more complicated than we think. Seriously how would I know? Maybe I am ultimately being encouraged to switch off and watch endless superhero based entertainment instead and staying rage filled and “informed” is my civic duty. I don’t know. Remember this is a criminal trial in another country. Or forget that because that's not important. I don't know.</p><p>I do believe that anyone who refuses to acknowledge the power they wield either alone or in concert with others is destined to abuse that power. Atheists, Buddhists, Baptists, Jehovah Witnesses, Non-binary punkrockers, adult male bronies, socialist feminists, any of these groups can pretend to be only holding underdog cards in their hands. Always on the back foot and always righteously defensive is good for survival. It’s terrible for accountability.</p><p>We have also been rendered powerless in the path of a simple virus. We have compromised in our homes and made concessions with those in our bubbles assuming we have had secure housing and other people in our bubbles. The great soft food of capitalism is on sale this Christmas again with its promise that we deserve something; an overdue holiday, a new car, a reward for all our sacrifices. Somehow this deservedness is only deepened if we profited through this pandemic like God's nod to the winner of a coin toss. Forget if we were incredibly lucky. We are tired, we are scared, we are lonely, we are good people. Don’t tell me I have power when I feel so crushed. Tell that to them. Your them of course. No point, it seems, in being fraught.</p><div><br /></div>Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-2483082852559230862021-10-21T17:52:00.000-07:002021-10-21T17:52:37.503-07:00Hello after some time.<p> I want to...<br /><br />There are so many things I want to say on this blog. But I have lost the discipline of both reading and writing substantive texts. It is so hard to arrange my thoughts into the sorts of words that make up a blog post. <br /><br />I do not see this blog as the space for short and pithy writing like on Facebook or wherever you tweet your instas. I don't say this to claim this blog is qualitatively different. This blog itself is part of a google empire in which content feeds interaction which feeds you to advertisers. The consumption is not in the direction we imagine. The distinction is merely that this is long form content. I like how it forces me to think in longer form. <br /><br />I will try and keep paragraphs to one point, which is one of the best rules anyone ever came up with, but I am not able to easily see what is one point or two or three points anymore. I have mostly conversed with people through "chat" for the last few months. That's a weird sort of dialogue. Often you're halfway through a long thought and someone else writes in. I have forgotten how to communicate properly. I always try and communicate properly on this blog. <br /><br />I want to communicate properly, also both precisely and accurately (which are not the same thing exactly). And honestly. As honestly as I can. <br /><br />Honestly I think we're in big trouble. We need to act. We need to get our shit together. Seriously. There is a Behemoth in the land and its name is Stupidity. And the first real rule of Stupidity is that nobody gets to talk about stupidity. Nobody gets to talk about its violence, nobody gets to talk about the thousands of deaths thanks to willful stupidity we are wading through. And the thousands more ahead. The orphans of that; Are they safe? Will they fall in among the 20 million people kept in slavery today? Why is it always time for tax cuts and cuts to government spending? Whose pushing this? Whose telling you its ok; the problems with society aren't in that direction. Don't follow the money. Look at the sin of vanity more generally. Aren't we all a little vain when we lust after money, to use the original meaning of the word vain - to hunger only for that which is fleeting. And all the anger and the rage flows out of you and you feel calmer and saner and more able to cope but less able to do anything else but cope. The continual criminal murder of the poor by the rich that is enacted before us. How is it possible? How is it happening? How long has it been happening? Why can't we get that history straight?<br /><br />And all of that in my head is a single point, like a giant lump of poorly cooked pasta. I have others, equally pressing, equally loud. We're all going to die. I have anxiety around airborne pollutants. I build my kid the craziest stuff to climb in the backyard. There are lots of physical dangers I shrug off. I don't jump away from spiders. But fumes, pollution, and it turns out airborne viruses are scary to me. We were in the Eyre Peninsula, in S.A., during the big fires and thank God for that. I am not sure how I would have coped knowing my kids just breathed in the smoke that shrouded some places for weeks. Now we're opening up and covid is in the community and I just need to transition to coping. Our protections; my partner's and my waning vaccine, my oldest kids antibodies still underdeveloped from her recent second shot, my youngest, her age.<br /><br />What are you coping with? I tell myself you probably have it worse as if that is supposed to help either of us. I think what I'm trying to do is to stop myself whingeing. We tell people every sadness matters but we know that isn't entirely true. Some people are sad that they didn't get a second desert. Some are sad that they don't have a home free of perpetual violence. I am reluctant to write in case it sounds like I am whingeing when others have it much worse. Lets focus on those others then. Let's be disturbed by homelessness rather than my sugar cravings and lack of things to watch on telly. <br /><br />Because somehow we are building nuclear submarines instead. We haven't even got a second fire fighting helicopter. We used to borrow a second from the US but now our fire seasons are overlapping. I don't know if we can reengineer the submarines to squirt water out of their periscopes but that's still only a coastal solution. We laugh. We have to laugh. It's all just so absurd. The National Farmers Federation is pleading with the National Party, the party ostensibly for farmers, to take climate change seriously. It's endlessly varying runs of the theatre of catastrophe. It's exhausting to watch.<br /><br />What we need are stories and a plan. There are probably a few other things but stories, about the real capacity of humans to do amazing things, or that uncover the real problems we are facing, are important. A plan is tough. I have ideas.<br /><br />I am also reminded of the wisdom of Chun-Tzu. Sometimes we do need useless thought. Thinking about the origins of the universe for example, if universes have origins. Perhaps they have oranges instead. It is sometimes when we meander down those paths we take the breaths we never even realised we needed. There is nothing directly relevant to all the catastrophes of our immediate context in this lecture about<a href="https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/scifi-apes" target="_blank"> Apes in Science Fiction</a>, or this one about the <a href="https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/evil-eve" target="_blank">politics of Eve</a>, but they are well worth listening to. If nothing else they help by organising our thoughts. Paragraphs with a proper TEEL structure painted in precise sentences is a step in the right direction.<br /><br /><br /><br /></p>Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-18285110051776023242021-02-21T05:27:00.004-08:002021-02-21T06:02:44.060-08:00What do wolves look like? : Reeling from Ravi Zacharias<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq05JiA92j353a4vHrJPeMJfxZEpYtTm4S0Z0nLvu8VFKVl_rr03qyyWaN3SApciUuWL6LkMlYbEgIKDXpo3zMBI08gpsg5TOpyjhjgRFLFtZ2KY1gLuYka89gTpJnplr3E7GB-tU0Vz3b/s339/raviz.PNG" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="339" data-original-width="294" height="331" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgq05JiA92j353a4vHrJPeMJfxZEpYtTm4S0Z0nLvu8VFKVl_rr03qyyWaN3SApciUuWL6LkMlYbEgIKDXpo3zMBI08gpsg5TOpyjhjgRFLFtZ2KY1gLuYka89gTpJnplr3E7GB-tU0Vz3b/w288-h331/raviz.PNG" width="288" /></a></div>Ravi Zacharias died in May 2020 and at that time was broadly lauded as a champion of the Christian gospel. In his life he founded <a href="https://www.rzim.org/" target="_blank">RZIM</a>, an international organisation with million dollar budgets in several countries, and personally authored or co-authored thirty-three books. He travelled in the circles of the most influential evangelical Christians whose eulogies assured their audiences he was now with his Lord and Saviour in heaven. Mike Pence, then Vice President of the United States heaped praise on him at his memorial service. <p></p><p>These accolades came despite allegations of sexual abuse perpetrated by Ravi Zacharias. RZIM officially dismissed those allegations as being baseless attempts to tear down a man of God. A few dissented from this conclusion but they were in the minority. I myself, while having a low opinion of Ravi Zacharias as a writer and thinker, reserved judgement about whether he was an abuser.</p><p>Post his death there has been a full independent enquiry and it has revealed that not only did Ravi commit the few abuses he was suspected of, but that he systematically preyed on young vulnerable women. <a href="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rzimmedia.rzim.org/assets/downloads/Report-of-Investigation.pdf" target="_blank">The full report</a> is well worth a read in order to grasp the magnitude of his actions. </p><p>Evangelical Christians are well aware of this issue and within evangelical Christianity there are already a range of voices debating the implications of this. I am pleased to see that a number of evangelical commentators are taking this very seriously. In some cases labelling it <a href="https://au.thegospelcoalition.org/article/the-great-betrayal-an-open-letter-to-christian-friends-on-ravi-zacharias/" target="_blank">unprecedented</a> in “scale, scope, breadth, depth, persistence, and complexity” and calling for nothing less than <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcWeZS3cnNo" target="_blank">a total honest facing</a> of a pattern of abuse that we do not know the extent of. </p><p>To give some idea of this extent, there were 200 different spa contacts, across the US and Asia, part of a network owned in indirect, convoluted ways by Ravi, that Ravi Zaccharias had in his phone. Sites in the US have been revealed as where Ravi conducted his abuse and none of the Asian Spa contacts have been independently interviewed yet about whether the abuse occurred there. Ravi’s manipulation and control over the young women who worked there used money donated to his organisation for charitable purposes in a global operation of abuse. After making women financially dependant on him, he used blatant spiritual abuse to weaken their resolve to escape or report against him. He used confidences gained in his role as a Christian leader to build trust and render his victims vulnerable. He raped at least one woman and afterwards prayed with her to thank God for what they had done.</p><p>Perhaps unsuprisingly Martin Illes from the Australian Christian Lobby is among those who have missed the point. He makes a <a href="https://youtu.be/1k6qxRr8DMw?t=1412" target="_blank">9 minute statement</a> on the matter after spending 23 minutes lambasting Dan Andrews. In his statement, Marin Illes describes Ravi’s behaviour as simply the outworking of the human heart, a heart bent on deception, and that looking at his behaviour as anything we are incapable of ourselves is foolish. Furthermore according to Martin we should be careful not to judge because we too have “sinners hearts”. This should not be read as humility but a red flag to Martin’s followers. Ravi was a systematic and repeatedly unrepentant manipulator of the vulnerable who showed a pathological disinterest in the suffering of his victims. He crushed in the public sphere those who challenged him on this in his life and then continued to offend. If you do not think this is extraordinary for a Christian leader and you are in Christian leadership you should immediately step down and seek help.</p><p>I have read commentary that is even more disturbing, implying that Ravi was himself a victim of temptation. Some have gone so far as to still suggest that Ravi is being falsely accused. I don’t think these comments reflect the majority of those who were once Ravi fans. I think the dominant tone is one of betrayal sometimes blunted by the Martin Illes of the world and sometimes more unconditionally expressed. When Archbishop Pell was initially charged and later convicted for sexual abuse, only to have that conviction overturned by a higher court, there were Catholics who said his trials were just an attack on the church by those who would always hate the church. They were not reflective of the majority of Catholics I know, who can tell you the moment in the whole process they decided Archbishop Pell was suss. I estimate feelings here to be similar for evangelical Christians as a whole, as much as these two situations are comparable.</p><p>Are they comparable? Evangelical Christianity is not formally organised like the Catholic Church. It is harder to say what position of trust and authority Ravi Zacharias held than it is to state George Pells official status and thus harder to infer the meaning of his deciet. There are after all numerous independent evangelical churches. It is possible for evangelicals in one church to compartmentalise Ravi’s abuse as his own churches problem. But again this doesn’t seem to be what prominent voices on sites like the Gospel Coalition are doing. </p><p>The reason for this is that Ravi was very much part of their evangelical tribe. By contrast Hillsong church is headed by Brian Houston who covered up his fathers abuse of children and Hillsong has recently had to sack Carl Lentz , its senior New York pastor for having multiple affairs but Hillsong is closer to the Pentecostal and even prosperity theology churches than the reformed sort of evangelicalism that the Gospel Coalition speaks from. To simplify, Hillsong is feeling-based spirituality which a respectable reformed evangelical knows not to trust. (Baptists are not historically part of the reformed tradition). Ravi was reason and argument which reformed evangelicals expect to be more reliable. He was logic and evidence. And he was a manipulative, fraud and serial abuser. That is a much bigger blow.</p><p>Time will tell whether Ravi Zacharias’ betrayal of trust will have any substantial effect and what that effect will be. I was pleased to see a <a href="https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/women-not-problem/" target="_blank">Gospel Coalition article</a> that pointed away from the Billy Graham rule as a solution. This rule, made somewhat famous outside the church by Mike Pence, suggests that a male church leader should never be alone with a woman other than their wife. This is a solution that only serves to entrench male only leadership because it is never enacted in a way that obliges men to step down or away from anything. Ravi Zacharias himself claimed to follow this rule and although this is now known to be just another lie it can be seen that invoking this rule offers no institutional protection.</p><p>For those of us more outside the church I wonder what we will take from this incident. I already do not trust a certain type of religious man who gravitates to positions of teaching authority. I have seen how on a local level they can make their churches accommodate their sensitivities without any explicit instruction as if they were children with the loudest tantrum. I am wary when, as authors, their names become more and more prominent on their book covers or their wives and children feature prominently in their bio as if part of their resume. I don’t trust how they construct expert panels of likeminded peers. I am alert to when they put on a pastoral veneer and sit uncomfortably close to potential critics in order to counsel them. I anticipate how that veneer will slip and reveal a spiteful anger if they are challenged. I have spent a fair amount of time around evangelical churches and Ravi Zacharias is not a surprise. </p><p>To say I don’t trust male religious celebrities or those who aspire to be one, is still to stop short of expecting betrayal from them. I was genuine when I said I reserved judgement at Ravi’s death about whether abuse allegations against him were true. My attitude to these people has been they may be good or bad and time will tell; When they are both conservative and certain, I am inclined to think they are uncritical thinkers, but I haven’t assumed that they will be abusive of their power. </p><p>Ravi’s abuse, the cover-ups at Hillsong, all the global scandals of the Catholic church, <a href="https://www.christiantoday.com/article/decline-and-fall-the-slow-erosion-of-mars-hill/42568.htm">the Mars Hill toxic culture</a>, and on and on, however, cannot help but have an effect on me. I suspect I am starting to expect this kind of scandal from prominent religious authority figures especially whenever they are treated as anointed prophets like Ravi Zacharias was. I suspect I am making the same assumptions about people who act in a similar way in the smaller ponds of local churches too. That's not the genuinely humble and hardworking ministers I know who would probably blush at any thanks for their work but those who already have reputations they need others to be mindful of, as they are likely to be "going places". At some point it is hard to feel any shock when such stars end up catastrophically failing our trust. At some point it becomes natural to err in the direction of assuming the worst. We are way past fool me once territory here.<br /><br />_____________________________________________<br /><br />If this post raises issues for you and you would like to discuss things with a trained professional <br />In Australia; <a href="https://www.lifeline.org.au/">https://www.lifeline.org.au/</a> 13 11 14<br />In the US; <a href="https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/">https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/</a> 1-800-273-8255</p><div><br /></div>Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-83345638131793402852020-12-14T19:07:00.005-08:002020-12-15T21:56:24.369-08:00Using the law to fight Conversion Therapy.<p></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: small;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: small;"><br /><br /></span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLl1qvoD45pKFXS_mWVwVz2KeXkp2UbLXG3Dplpe4m62qKeZhfwDJVhgRCpBT9Yw-LtEpxaVfEzkxGIMtmX8edpr_04thGQPOU46wHa7Eik0sLVIFiKc4afFHw9auKsEauv-esqtBJ_Vwm/s548/gosford.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="548" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLl1qvoD45pKFXS_mWVwVz2KeXkp2UbLXG3Dplpe4m62qKeZhfwDJVhgRCpBT9Yw-LtEpxaVfEzkxGIMtmX8edpr_04thGQPOU46wHa7Eik0sLVIFiKc4afFHw9auKsEauv-esqtBJ_Vwm/w378-h252/gosford.jpg" width="378" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br />I was raised a Catholic and for a brief period of my life became a born again Christian. I left most of organised Christianity about the same time as I began identifying as bisexual when I hit university. I absorbed a bunch of unhelpful attitudes about sexuality and gender from both the wider culture and the Christian organisations I was a part of growing up, including clearly homophobic messages, but I never went through any form of conversion therapy to get me to identify as straight or to be more unambiguously masculine. By the time my churches knew this was my situation I was already out the door.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">I mention this so that you can, if you want, disregard the rest of this post on the Victorian Government’s “change and suppression bill”. You might prefer to listen to </span><a href="http://socesurvivors.com.au/" style="font-family: helvetica;">the direct voices of survivors of conversion therapy</a><span style="font-family: helvetica;">, some of whom have been involved in developing this bill. I have felt conflicted in writing this. I feel I have a responsibility to comment which I explain at the end of this piece. I also feel I have a responsibility to acknowledge my lack of direct experience of conversion strategies and my lack of expertise in truly knowing their current reach. I hope I am doing the right thing in publishing this. </span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">The proposed Victorian law will penalise, with up to 10 years in prison, attempts to change or suppress peoples sexuality or gender identity, that result in injury. Injury is not defined in the legislation. It is fair to predict that injury is meant to include psychological injury as well as physical. It does not seem to matter if the injury was unforeseen or unintended and it definitely doesn’t matter if the victim was an adult and consenting participant. Certainly the meaning of attempt is intended to be as broad as possible and from the statement issued by survivors may even include excluding someone from a faith community, as well as informal prayer ministries and publishing “stories of supposed ‘successful’ instances of conversion”. The broadest definition of the law can’t be dismissed as impossible; that the bill will permit jailing any one who counsels someone against same-sex relationships if that person could say they suffered distress because of it, even if they actually sought out the counsel. It may be that this wont ever happen for less serious instances due to discretion at the prosecutor or judicial level but it remains within the scope of the law.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">I want to to argue against a conflation that is happening with this bill. The Victorian Premier has called “suppression and change” practices bigoted, cruel and harmful. The victims of these programs know their harms first hand. What the government then goes on to also argue, with the support of survivors, is that people who practice conversion and suppression practices should be intimidated to stop with the threat of legal penalties. I want to state that, if suppression and changes strategies are as broadly defined as they seem to be, one does not follow the other. I consider, for example, a prayer circle held over a person to ask God to make them less gay, as a practice that is just wrong for multiple reasons (wrong about God and wrong about sexuality) and I want to end this practice, but I don't want to threaten the people organising or participating in this event with jail time. Because this is primarily a philosophy blog I am going to talk about this in terms of some general principles.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Life presents us with many things that will harm us. Some are performed by others out of malice or error. It is reasonable to think that the law is there to deter these harmful acts by making them crimes so that we can all have our best life. The opposing argument is that the law is simply there to reflect a universally true set of moral arrangements between people, even when those arrangements causes pain. For example, it is theft to take someone’s jacket out of their bin even if you are freezing according to the strict application of the law. The law’s primary function in this second view is to acknowledge our true rights and freedoms regardless of harms or benefits.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">This classic liberal legal philosophy, that the law is simple a framework of rights unconcerned with outcomes, is just a lie. It chooses to forget the law exists between parties who are deeply unequal in power and who have historically been brought to be so unequal through obvious injustices. If you want to prosecute those historical injustices you will be told that would be too hard or cause too much harm. Likewise a robodebt for the rich who pay little tax is never as likely to be enacted as such a scheme for those on centrelink payments. You will see free speech advocates also prosecuting whistle blowers who expose corruption and pillorying anyone who criticises Anzac Day. In this and numerous other cases, the championing of rights and freedoms is unconcerned with outcomes right up until it impacts negatively on the powerful and their preferences. Then the same law makers are as pragmatic as possible. If the law was ever genuinely applied mercilessly across all classes it would be unlike anything we have ever seen.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">I myself believe that the law has no exact job and we as a society might reasonably use it to achieve some things which another equally reasonable society might not use the law to do. There is no “pax-ratio” (peace by reason) here that tells us exactly what should be crimes and exactly where the boundaries of right to property or free speech lie. In saying this I reject the position of those who think the law must either always respect free speech or freedom of religion or the integrity of a person’s sexual orientation or the right to live as the gender of one's choice for that matter. In deciding what the law should do we must make choices about the society we want and the harms we are willing to inflict or overlook to create it. There are often competing values in play.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">We can proceed by just imagining the world as we want it and then doing what we can to make it so. This was a legal philosophy I heard repeatedly from opponents to same sex marriage only recently. “Other groups are able to argue for the view of marriage they want so why shouldn’t Christians do the same.” is an actual quote from when I listened to a Bendigo Baptist panel on the same-sex marriage plebiscite. Likewise why not argue for chaplains in schools if you believe that Christians can bring a special something to the job, even if in practice this treads on norms about no religious discrimination in public sector employment. If you like the outcome that should be enough to pursue it and other sections of society can pursue their societal dreams too. It’s all part of a pluralist nightmare.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">I say nightmare because in this scenario the only people restraining us from cultural totalitarianism are our opponents. We do not obligate ourselves to do so. We have seen such a cultural tyranny emerge in post ww2 western societies and queer people faced the pointy end of that stick. Jail time for being gay, murders of queer people overlooked, instant dismissal from employment and eviction from homes, loss of parenting rights, forced treatments, public hero worship of those who profess to have cured us…. Look to Poland and you can see it happening again. A few churches took a principled stand in their culturally dominant position and defended us. Others, along with all the lukewarm masses who follow whoever is in power, were happy to let disgust be the sole arbiter of the law. And queers disgusted them so why not use the law to eliminate us.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">I want to address the queer movement in today's historical moment. I want us to consider what we are forming an alliance with in order to pursue the world we want. I don’t want us to step away from the hope we have. We should not be content that kids are being told they are broken in their sexualities. We should not be ok that God is being wielded as a weapon against queer people. But let’s notice that queer groups in Victoria are increasingly entering an alliance with government and state power. I don’t think anyone could look at the relationship between queer groups and the state and not think the state is the more powerful of the two but queer groups are obtaining certain victories even if they might eventually be pyrrhic ones. We see this in education and we see it in this change and suppression bill. The federal government is pretty much doing the same with conservative churches so I am not trying to make some argument about who holds more power here or who is willing to lie down with government more (it's still the churches). I am simply elevating our own activist strategy up for scrutiny.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">I don’t think there is never a time for involving the state, the police, the judiciary and even prisons. If this legislation was about harms inflicted on people who did not consent or on children or if we were talking about people making false medical claims then I think it's much more justified to bring in the handcuffs. I don’t think though that prison is justified whenever engaging with adults we disagree with. We might even be disgusted by their homophobia and transphobia but that is not enough to lock them up. This is our cultural moment to show legislative restraint by restricting the scope of this legislation to cases where adult consent is not present.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">It is also our time to repay those churches who historically defended us when they held cultural power over us. A defender is not an ally. They do not share causes with those they defend. They still want to win against those they defend in the argument they are having. A defender however refuses to concede their enemies humanity and rights. An example of a defender would be Catholic priest Father Paul Kelly who fought for the abolition of the gay panic defence in Queensland in 2008. I have no idea whether Kelly wants the same world I want in terms of queer issues but I feel confident in naming him as a defender and frankly a bit of a hero for his work. Less impressively, through the late 60’s and 70’s, several churches opposed the criminalization of homosexuality. In some cases these statements were qualified by reiterating that this would improve the chance of people obtaining treatment for their homosexuality. It was a long way from embracing their queer congregants and a queer agenda but they were limited defences of queer peoples basic humanity. </span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">I want Christians to rejoice in same sex relationships, to acknowledge their good fruit and pray for God’s blessing over them. I want them to listen and accept their transgender members insight and faith. I want congregants to stop listening to puffed up men who pretend to know God's will in ways that entrench their own authority. I want churches that shame and belittle those who challenge authority to empty. I would consider using the police, courts and the prison system to achieve only very limited ends in pursuing this goal however. That would include stopping treatments like electro shock therapy or therapies that lack adult consent. In other cases I would rather picket churches and disrupt services, or do the hard slow and frustrating work of conversation and relationship building, to elicit change. I think we need to step back from the suppression and change bill as it is proposed and rethink the long term strategy here in giving such a powerful role to the state to achieve our goals.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">I come to this conclusion while acknowledging that a reasonable person may disagree with me. All laws trade off rights and freedoms to reduce harms. You may consider the conversion industry to be duplicitous and manipulative enough that a broad and harsh law is the only thing that will give its current victims any power. You may also not consider the rights of evangelical homophobes an issue that warrants your attention. There are many groups having their rights trashed by governments in Australia. The federal minister who signed off on Rio Tinto’s destruction of the Juukan Gorge caves is still in their job and the laws that permitted it are still unchanged. I could've written on that instead. I didn’t write this piece because what happens to Christians with a problem with homosexuality and transgender identity is my biggest concern, however. I wrote it because I have higher hopes for queer activism and my concern is with its direction.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p>
<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br />
</p><br /><p></p>Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-10830945268129215532020-07-13T00:46:00.001-07:002020-07-15T06:07:18.647-07:00Life is Not a Game.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw6BEFMWmoYVE_hyGXIGYaXHg6Kng7wYg4aAulHKBAyKLGBcK1CWBzA2uG_-zzZ1nA8XFld4tUp8_E7JEi0MFldS7qRAlJiecW6dO4IyrC_iJdqxTP2JdmlxuMgOWNqdKzdjWDXCZXxHfA/s1600/Life.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw6BEFMWmoYVE_hyGXIGYaXHg6Kng7wYg4aAulHKBAyKLGBcK1CWBzA2uG_-zzZ1nA8XFld4tUp8_E7JEi0MFldS7qRAlJiecW6dO4IyrC_iJdqxTP2JdmlxuMgOWNqdKzdjWDXCZXxHfA/s400/Life.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
I love games. I play them, make them and find their history fascinating. I don’t mean computer games, which I don’t mind. I mean board games where computational engines of dice and cards and human interaction tell stories straight out of the box. While I could easily write pages about how much games help us understand economics, politics and more, I want to explain how games are not the model we really want to help us understand life. Life is not a game.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
Albert Camus, the existentialist philosopher, wrote that whether or not to commit suicide is the only really serious problem of philosophy. The rest is conversation. I would disagree and say that all of ethics matters and that suicide is only one of the mistakes we can make. It is not trivial to ask if we should be vegetarian or join an army or be kind to strangers or any other number of ethical questions. However for many people contemplating suicide is the most profound ethical debate they will ever have with themselves and games are the wrong tool for preparing us for that discussion.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
Again, I want to say that games are great. I feel about games the way movie buffs enjoy film. But the movie buff needs to remember that life is not a movie, in that it is not something you just watch unfold. Likewise the game buff needs to remember that life is not a game in that it is not something you win or lose. In games with win conditions it is sometimes possible to see how the game will unfold well ahead of its conclusion. With several turns to go with only widening distance between first and last players it is normal for players to lose interest. The winner slogs their way to the end with the promise of glory but even their joy is lost. The loser drifts away from the table or increasingly looks at their phone. When that happens in regards to real life, suicide or self-destructive behaviour is one result; anything to disrupt the march to a foregone outcome.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
This is what makes chess an excellent game by the way. No matter how poor your board position is you can still sometimes force a stalemate if not steal an actual victory from your opponent, almost to the very end. Even more importantly the culture around chess is that winning is not the point. People play out games in order to learn from their losses. This is a cultural norm that is firmly taught to new players and is a stroke of conceptual genius. For chess players, chess is always just a game. Defeat in chess does not mean anything beyond the game. And victory does not make you a better person.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
As I say this about chess you might be thinking that seems false. In pop culture chess is not talked about as if it was just a game but stands as a metaphor for business, international conflict and depressingly for some people interpersonal relationships. Historically people thought chess made them better at being real generals and historically being a good general was winning at life. The cold war made chess matches between Russia and the US act as tests for their respective ideologies. Perhaps it is in reaction to this that local chess clubs strenuously teach the art of losing well while people who aren’t familiar with chess are often reluctant to learn simply because they think losing will make them look destined to lose at life. Despite the actual cultural embrace of losing by serious chess players, chess metaphors are exactly the sort of poorly borrowed mentality of win-lose gaming that are a horrid way to understand life.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
Victory conditions in games are clearly defined. There are notable exceptions to this I’ll mention later but the statement is true for 9 out of 10 products you’ll find boxed at a game store and certainly true for chess. Rules are fixed at the outset and provide a maximum scope for your play. Your turn consists of moving one piece for example. In other games you must reveal hidden information when instructed to. Rules often have the assumption that players will be pushing the limits of what they can do in order to win and only the rules hold them in check. Does this remind you of how businesses are expected to operate? Does this define the legitimate behaviour of landlords or traders or taxpayers? What if a corporation is capable of lobbying politicians to rewrite the rules? This too becomes part of the game. Fair play is defined as pushing the rules as far as they go and winning is as simply determined as possible. In fact could anything be more like the generic victory points found in many games than money? It doesn’t matter if you made your money selling crack or singing ballads, it’s still X number of points towards victory.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
Perhaps the most stomach turning example of what I mean is Neill Strauss’s “The Game” and other treatises of pick up artists. Here dating is reduced to trying to win more sexual victories and this is the sole measure by which strategies are evaluated. Does “negging” sap a person’s confidence, tap into their insecurities and manipulate them into looking to you for fulfilment they don’t actually need? Maybe but if it gets you laid that’s a win. From this source we have “incel” culture in which people are encouraged to identify as losers in the dating game, and from this identity the risks of violence against others and self are very real. Why bother playing when you are so far behind those in the lead? This is economics applied to dating after economics has been converted into a game.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDJFNmBf6VY6eJLadnTMHmcElveh1pF384gKKtq6WtxO5H_x_ac3LAV9cdZJkLmgbarUyJBL2SaXVb6fxvEShyphenhyphenllS2uhDhZqSsGN062JtVWjXXOkEy8dxEAW9HRfQCIQbX8I1aITHKCHXu/s1600/pand.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1125" data-original-width="1500" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDJFNmBf6VY6eJLadnTMHmcElveh1pF384gKKtq6WtxO5H_x_ac3LAV9cdZJkLmgbarUyJBL2SaXVb6fxvEShyphenhyphenllS2uhDhZqSsGN062JtVWjXXOkEy8dxEAW9HRfQCIQbX8I1aITHKCHXu/s320/pand.jpg" width="320" /></a>2020 has been a year when a great many people have been going backwards in their personal economic game. Before the pandemic the bushfires in Australia destroyed many people’s property. Before then many people were brutalised by a Robodebt scandal that hasn’t cost a single minister or public servant their job. Before then average real wages have been declining while wealth has been increasing for a small minority for some time. Suicide and COVID-19 are going toe to toe for who can kill more people and COVID-19 is a highly infectious disease which has turned our way of life on its head. High rates of suicide is tragically both the old normal and the new normal. The only solution our governments have is to restart the game and get people back to their losing positions at the table.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
It is worth noting that no civilisation has ever lasted while running their economy and society in the particular game-like way that we do. Radical egalitarianism is imposed in the longest continuous cultures like Australian Aboriginal culture or that of the San people in South Africa. In urbanised Ancient Egypt workers’ rights were strictly protected and debt was regularly cancelled. I’m not saying that playing competitive games will create a suicidal culture. We can play the most brutal games, if we remember they are just games not metaphors. If we play our society, economy and dating culture in the same way though we shouldn’t be surprised that suicide is as common as it is. When I look at policies like Robodebt I have to consider that this is a possible intention.</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
To end on a more positive note I mentioned there are games where victory conditions are not clearly defined. Role playing games of which there are many variants are not so much about winning as about playing out a character. I have yet to play "Fog of Love" but when Shut Up and Sit Down reviewed the game they made it look like something that might really represent relationships for people who aren’t pick up artists. Please watch <a href="https://youtu.be/8a9oNOjI8V4">their review</a>. It shows that its possible to strive for one outcome without seeing a different outcome as a loss. It shows that every relationship and every persons story is unique. Also when my friends and I play our board games we play to win but we sit down at the table to have a good time. We choose the game that will make the whole experience the most fun, fixing the rules for everyone’s benefit. That way everyone wins. Imagine if we build society in the same way.</div>
<br />
____________<br />
<br />
If this post raised any issues of safety for yourself please call Lifeline or reach out to those close to you.<br />
<div class="WLSb4b" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 4px;">
<span style="font-size: large;">13 11 14</span></div>
<h3 class="WdjyDc" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px;">
Lifeline Australia</h3>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
Please add your own countries relevant hotlines in the comments.</div>
<div class="WLSb4b" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 32px; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 4px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div>
<br /></div>
</div>
Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-29607711503310148902020-07-03T00:15:00.003-07:002020-07-03T00:29:11.862-07:00Who are the police? Part one of many.<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWOVDOFFm-7gGPlGE9pFI8rhz7q15DBUYY0vLk5pQLePve4IaO-u7O8V9dPNKN-th4C4q_qvq_m_R_mJt2BRhe3cYxaUhYLOkrvUGvXsv6nyeCLG8cU-Z2TVC4njqAero8B7ZGF9tRkAgZ/s1600/visiting_clergy_banner2-1000x205.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="205" data-original-width="1000" height="131" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWOVDOFFm-7gGPlGE9pFI8rhz7q15DBUYY0vLk5pQLePve4IaO-u7O8V9dPNKN-th4C4q_qvq_m_R_mJt2BRhe3cYxaUhYLOkrvUGvXsv6nyeCLG8cU-Z2TVC4njqAero8B7ZGF9tRkAgZ/s640/visiting_clergy_banner2-1000x205.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
There is no doubt that there are good police. But a good police officer is no reason to have the police.<br />
<br />
There is no doubt that there are bad police. But a bad police officer is no reason to get rid of the police.<br />
<br />
Consider the vexing issue of clergy. This issue is only vexing if you care. So if you have left behind caring about the issue of clergy I invite you back to church for this issue alone.<br />
<br />
There are good clergy. And bad clergy. But whether we have the clergy is the question of whether the good priests or the bad ones are the aberrations, or whether the good clergy might be better people if they weren’t clergy at all or if the people in the pews might be better served by there being no clergy.<br />
<br />
And all these sorts of questions are perfectly normal sorts of questions. And some churches do alright with clergy and some do alright without clergy. And sometimes when there are no clergy some people just start acting like clergy. And sometimes when there are clergy the clergy keep that from happening while they themselves are not particularly acting like clergy either, which means that in some places having clergy feels more like there being no clergy than in other places where there actually is no official clergy.<br />
<br />
And we can talk about all these things. We can talk about clergy and the problems of clergy. And whether or not clergy should have guns that fire smoke grenades and tear gas cannisters. What the hell are neighborhood clergy doing with tear gas - that can only be used against crowds. Its not like they are gonna use tear gas to take down a single gunman is it? And those fire crackers they fired at everyday people with the journalists just standing there. What are those fire cracker things? I don’t think we should have any clergy with those at all.<br />
<br />
And choke holds. Zero choke holds.<br />
<br />
And clergy who kill people. They should go to jail.<br />
<br />
And clergy who use undue force. They should not be allowed to keep being clergy.<br />
<br />
And it shouldn’t just be clergy who decide this. It should definitely not be just a group of clergy deciding whether or not a clergyman has to go to jail when they commit a crime.<br />
<br />
And it absolutely shouldn’t be clergy who investigate other clergy, who have to decide between betraying a brother or obeying the law. That shouldn’t be on them. It mustn’t be on them.<br />
<br />
And we can talk about all of this. We can ask these questions. We are not being naughty to make these points. For we are all priests in the universal church of humanity.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<br /></div>
Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-81561327784212431512020-04-26T06:11:00.000-07:002020-04-27T06:47:36.219-07:00The Virus is not a moral beast.<img alt="File:PSM V81 D472 The short winged locust or grasshopper.png ..." src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/PSM_V81_D472_The_short_winged_locust_or_grasshopper.png" /><br />
It is not wrong to learn from events in our lives. If we carry a heavy box and drop it on our foot it is reasonable to see this as a lesson to ask for help with heavy loads in the future. We have experienced what might happen if we don’t ask for assistance. The distinction between this “looking for the lesson” in unfortunate events, and treating unfortunate events as a moral message from nature, the universe, or God must be made. This is especially so with diseases like COVID-19. We must not ignore the amorality of the virus’ behaviour, the amorality of solutions to the pandemics spread and the consequent responsibility we ourselves have, to insert morality into the choices we make in response to the pandemic.<br />
<br />
When I stress the amorality of COVID-19 this should be obvious. The virus infects people with no right or wrong to it. It doesn’t seem to be as easily caught by children, but not because it recognises their innocence or views their deaths as any kind of greater tragedy of lost opportunities. Likewise COVID-19 will cause death and calamity among the poorest people far worse than for wealthier groups who can afford to isolate and who have greater access to clean water and medical care. But COVID-19 is not in favour of the rich. It is not opting to be crueler to people of colour who have a greater risk of death from the disease and a harder time avoiding it. Neither is it concerned about not being racist or concerned about treating people of disparate wealth fairly.<br />
<br />
We need to note the amorality of COVID-19 because there are powerful psychological forces encouraging us to give it a moral dimension. We ask ourselves, “why is this happening now to this generation of humanity?” and for those of us lucky to live far from epidemic epicenters “why am I spared?” and the immediate answers are not particularly satisfying. Viruses are a part of this planets evolution. The periodically move from other species to us, particularly at the intersection of wild animals and humans. This virus spreads through human proximity and the modern world is a crowded place with extensive movement between nations. Human population density and travel within and across countries produce, from the virus’ perspective, a connected web of habitats over the earth. Spreading is inevitable.<br />
<br />
But spreading is also not inevitable. A society which housed its homeless, encouraged workers to use their universal sick leave and had a strong responsive health system would drastically reduce the spread of the virus. We could say the virus is telling us to reform our society or suffer the consequences. We could say the virus is a wake up call that the health of everyone depends on the health of the least of us and our economies should reflect that. Except there is a problem with this conclusion because it is also possible to conclude that a society which normally restricts human movement, tracks who you talk to and forbids gatherings of ten or more people, while incarcerating the homeless is also protected from any future diseases. The virus might be a wake up call that we cannot tolerate certain human liberties.<br />
<br />
Attributing either of these moral conclusions to the virus is what existentialist philosophy calls an act of bad faith. There is a choice to be made as to what lessons should be drawn from the pandemic and the choice belongs to us. When we attribute that lesson to the virus, to fate, God or the universe it conceals our moral choice and responsibility. We think this leaning on the virus as authority strengthens our arguments but it simply locks us and those who disagree with us in positions of polarised difference. By trading facts about the virus as if they were themselves political arguments about how society should be, we politicise the facts or at least what they mean and we hide our own biases. I don’t think we should hide a bias against death camps and for public housing myself – we should argue that bias explicitly.<br />
<br />
Such biases are necessary because nature is not designed for us. Sunsets are not beautiful to amuse us. Leaves don’t fall in piles for us to play in. We can find sunsets beautiful and play in piles of leaves but it isn't their intent. If nature is attacking us, in the form of the virus, it therefore does not mean that we have done something wrong. We have not necessarily acted incorrectly. It is true that there are generally patterns of co-operation in nature as much as there is competition, if not more. It is true therefore that when the world becomes more inhabitable for any reason we should check our own interactions with the world for causes. But it's also true that what is incompatible with accommodating nature is not necessarily bad. It might make life harder for our species if we extend human life regularly beyond sixty. It might create vectors for viruses in immune compromised senior citizens. It doesn’t make it wrong.<br />
<br />
A particularly dangerous type of bad faith is when the virus is attributed to an angry deity. When this is done any motivation that suits the speaker can be ascribed to the deity; it doesn’t even have to relate to how the virus behaves. After all, God could send a plague of locusts for completely unrelated crimes and their priests would be required to tell us the meaning of the catastrophe. I listened to a lengthy Christian sermon expounding how God is displeased with impiety and irreverence and especially liberalism in the church and has therefore sent the virus as a broad chastistement and reminder that they, with a view that corresponds to the preachers own, are to be heeded. Of course this interpretation comes from people who thought that acknowledging Jesus as God, complete with conservative affiliations, was a good idea before any pandemic. I suspect if I listened to the sermons and speeches of people of all manner of beliefs I would find someone in each case saying COVID-19 is a call to plead to their God for mercy and align oneself with their Gods views. The virus enables the speaker to pretend the message is not from them.<br />
<br />
When this bad faith is criticised we shouldn’t expect critics to be able to answer “Why couldn’t this be God saying something?” Proving a negative is nigh impossible. Why couldn’t the virus be a coded message from aliens? Why couldn’t it be an ex-partner trying to get me personally? Why couldn’t the pandemic be something I willed into being with my own psychic powers when I thought I might get sick? Such a question shifts the focus of the conversation. If the critics doubt that the virus came from God this can be labelled a refusal to permit God to act freely outside the critics own definitions of morality. That refusal and its theological arrogance becomes the new topic for dissection. Meanwhile the bad faith act of using an amoral virus to claim a moral message from God (in support of the speakers own views) escapes scrutiny.<br />
<br />
We are all tempted to tolerate bad faith speech when it supports values we agree with. If you tell me that this pandemic is nature encouraging us to slow down and smell the roses I might think a death toll in the hundreds of thousands to be an extreme way to communicate this but I still like the sentiment. As I scroll my social media feed I might be tempted to give that idea a thumbs up, even more so if you think that the virus is a call to look out for the vulnerable in society or to cease the trade in wild animals. I am more likely to recognise bad faith claims when they disagree with my values. If the virus is used to push values I like however then I have opened the door to it being used to communicate all manner of ideology.<br />
<br />
It's true that we should learn from this pandemic. We don’t want to be here again. We don’t want to repeat scenarios where a UK nursing home has a secret room for bodies and lacked PPE for staff or see the levels of panic and distrust that leads a man to try and crash a train into a hospital ship docked in New York. Or watch footage of Iranians licking surfaces because of their faith in Allah to protect them from the virus while the elderly just collapse in the street. There is a lot to be proud of our response to the pandemic and quite a bit that we need to reassess. All I am urging is that we own the choices and values we bring to that conversation rather than claiming they are revealed in the pandemic itself.<br />
<br />
You could conclude from all I’ve said so far that God has no place in this conversation. Certainly a God who speaks to us in storms and whose wisdom is divined by priests should be dismissed for the puppet they are. For one thing, why did they fail to warn their priests about the toilet paper shortage? But the people who are stitching face masks for front line health workers include people inspired by their faith as well as atheists and agnostics. Just like the Sikh foodtrucks during the bush fire crisis there are people whose God urges them to volunteer and to advocate for others in the midst of this pandemic. Such a God is not one whose morality is reflected in the pandemic but one whose morality must be inserted into it. Such a God resembles and inspires our own creativity and invention and ultimately our moral responsibility. I tip my hat to them and their followers.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-60898719642682465022020-03-19T17:11:00.000-07:002020-03-19T17:22:53.164-07:00Our lives are worth more.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDtoKo0dXeZwy0elBlN20VE2S5jjSfghEa9sXyA7Kkg4iXhRr9dznaSUBR1cyimndn_Ia_4pcdJiBC8eEI2e1R_xLz8kAf3qMpuEZVp-5rRKV3PBpKr60g-dcj7EBNAlXgnENIAjw9tu-g/s1600/yacht-fire-4344-default-medium.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="190" data-original-width="499" height="151" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDtoKo0dXeZwy0elBlN20VE2S5jjSfghEa9sXyA7Kkg4iXhRr9dznaSUBR1cyimndn_Ia_4pcdJiBC8eEI2e1R_xLz8kAf3qMpuEZVp-5rRKV3PBpKr60g-dcj7EBNAlXgnENIAjw9tu-g/s400/yacht-fire-4344-default-medium.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
There is a plan to save something very important during this pandemic we are experiencing. Lives will be lost in order to save this thing; my life possibly, hence my keen interest. Governments who love fiscal tightness will deliberately enter deficits largely by borrowing from the private sector so that this thing survives. The right and the left are united in calling for this thing to be rescued in some way. But I don’t know if the economy is worth saving.<br />
<br />
Our governments tend to be elected or thrown out almost entirely on how they manage the economy and why wouldn’t they? When the economy is strong, indicators of this are full (or fullish) employment, which is people making money and investor and consumer confidence, which is people’s hope they will make more money in the future. When you hear the ka-ching of money landing in your opened hands from the fountain of the economy and when you look up and see so much more money potentially on its way to you it feels good. Good enough to want to re-elect a government despite their open corruption. That lovely money is pizza and fixing your car and getting your sore tooth looked at and it’s a Charles and Di wedding anniversary set of Celine Dion reads the Koran. It’s choice. It’s control. It’s power in the marketplace in your hands.<br />
<br />
Then the real magic of a strong economy happens. You take that power and give it to your dentist. They now have the power to hire a secretary who has the power to pop over to yours and pay you to walk their dog. That’s power back in your hands again. You’re not losing anything. You and everyone else is just getting more done from that kitchen refit to that tattoo they always wanted. The tattooist and the carpenter and you all benefit.<br />
<br />
But economies don’t match the dream. In addition to increased income and spending another indication of a strong economy is inflation which is the reduction in actual value of any of that money that’s landing in your hands. That undoes the relationship between the ka-ching and the market power. Also not every body even gets to stand under the money waterfall. Some people stand under other people and catch what (if anything) spills out from their hands. Those dregs they get will, due to inflation, be worth less in real terms. Anybody who gets the same amount of golden coins as they received before the economy blooms is actually facing a reduction in marketplace power. They can’t go to the dentist anymore. The dentist has to sack the secretary. Your dog walking business goes nowhere.<br />
<br />
Lastly that circular effect of economic spending doesn’t always even happen when wealth increases. When you spend money you could be just pouring your money into some corporate conglomerate who sells tech products made for the cheapest labour costs in the world and pays no tax and whose overseas warehouse just sacked every employee but the unpaid intern who oils the robots. When this happens economic growth can’t achieve momentum. The extra pizzazz of a charged up economy is siphoned off into the same deep pockets who can’t seem to find a need for a twelfth bum wiper and so that economic power doesn’t return to you. But the recruitment officer does thank you for your enthusiastic application.<br />
<br />
Somewhere buried inside a strong economy is a “general lift in living standards” but its not a given that you in particular will be part of the generally benefiting at all or that even more than a few will. It’s still considered, illogically, by governments, as a general improvement in living standards if Mr. Burns buys an island while his whole workforce can’t afford their rents anymore. This is because by the power of averages its as if everybody got a coconut from the islands palm trees. Utilitarians however would largely agree that concentrated wealth is worth less than distributed wealth in terms of pleasure “points”. The value of a meal to a hungry person is more than the value of a better cut of steak to a well fed person and certainly worth more than the second steak the tycoon can’t even finish. The rich person may whinge louder than seems possible from an adult, when they lose their luxuries, but as we used to say over beers in my student lefty days you’ve got to learn to filter out the wealthys tantrums as a non-concern because they’re bullshit.<br />
<br />
For some time our relatively strong economy has been a horror for many of its participants. Rampant wage theft; No real wage growth despite corporate profits growing; Entrenched long term unemployment; Scandalous harassment of people on unemployment benefits, and disability and parenting payments; Robots (and I like Astroboy, he’s one of the good ones) are taking our jobs. In a number of countries student debt is growing astronomically. Good Old Boy Joe Biden was one of those who voted to prevent US tertiary students who couldn’t pay their loans ever declaring bankruptcy locking them in permanent financial servitude. In Australia we have a housing crisis that means people can’t afford home ownership while rents keep them in anxious poverty. On the other hand global yacht sales including super yachts have experienced <a href="https://www.reportlinker.com/p02284917/Yacht-Industry.html">steady growth above 4%</a> so it’s not all doom and gloom.<br />
<br />
I am a teacher in a secondary school. I will work with kids because I value their education and I value them as people and because I am a part of preserving human knowledge across generations. I will work with kids for additional hours (call me up these pending holidays if necessary) to free up medical staff who need to work on fighting this virus. I will do this even though schools are impossible places to strictly impose infection controls, although we could do better than we are currently, especially if we have less kids attending and threw some more money to hire more people to our overworked cleaners. But I am not risking my safety, the safety of my kids and your kids in my classes, in order to save the economy from going under. We are seeing endless energy from this government for squeezing the tits of the poor, and zero energy cracking down on wage theft. Hospitality workers lost penalty rates recently. High income tax cuts have not been cancelled to save the surplus but the underfunding of the NDIS and public schools is supposedly acceptable to get us to one. Nobody I know has got a super yacht.<br />
<br />
I say lets dump this economy. Let’s do something different. Something better. Something where everyone gets paid sick leave, where wage theft is taken seriously, where we have an anti-corruption commission with actual teeth, where nobody is homeless because housing is a right, not a way to make money. And if a teacher, a nurse or the staff at the supermarket checkout dies from this virus we can give them their own Viking funeral in one of those yachts.Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-78420082716533653092020-03-05T19:29:00.003-08:002020-03-07T21:58:10.022-08:00The Good Place reminds us of the offensiveness of afterlives.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQTtNcl854nSTZnh6qdFIyDsB-8jTEXyy5F3u9bcb_ShxEobBYXfCVuymjI2DfHx0ulv4I43j3A0zhLE5PCQsUoslQhVhKkAKOQewaj-4L73hh8HBfjphRd_RXxzzrUGDq6HzI1bHtSMZ4/s1600/0101_covst_goodplacejpg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQTtNcl854nSTZnh6qdFIyDsB-8jTEXyy5F3u9bcb_ShxEobBYXfCVuymjI2DfHx0ulv4I43j3A0zhLE5PCQsUoslQhVhKkAKOQewaj-4L73hh8HBfjphRd_RXxzzrUGDq6HzI1bHtSMZ4/s400/0101_covst_goodplacejpg.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
Note: This post contains spoilers for the Good Place. They are pretty incidental to the piece so you wont need to watch the show to understand anything but if you are planning to watch the show then come back and read this after you’re done. I loved the show myself and the twists in the show are worth not spoiling.</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
_____________________________________</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
Recently the series “The Good Place” came to an end. For most of the series audiences seemed happy to laugh along with it as it depicted a flawed system of determining who dies and ends up in the bad place, the good place or somewhere in between. “The judge” character came closest to some kind of God for the series and they were pretty much an object of good humoured ridicule but this was still not a problem for theists I know. The final episodes however rankled some commentators. I think this was because the whole series, despite being ostensibly set in the afterlife, played like its plot was a continuation of life. The real afterlife, meaning that which happens after the drama of life is complete, is only glimpsed at the very end and, as I’ve titled this piece, descriptions (and depictions) of the afterlife have the capacity to offend us.<br />
<br />
Afterlifes are often but not always systems of reward and punishment. When they are set up like that what they reward or punish is potentially offensive even if we don’t believe in the afterlife. If you were sitting down your children and telling them that only the eldest would get into heaven and the other would go to hell I would be offended by the injustice of this and as a second child some of that offence would be personal too. It is as if somehow I was going to go hell because of what you said, even though I don’t actually believe I will. My thinking here is not foolish. Even if I only believe in this mortal world the impact of such an afterlife description on your second child is real in this world. Calling it emotionally damaging seems too slight. Spiritually damaging seems fairer. I am right to be somewhat offended.<br />
<br />
This offence of injustice can work many ways. We can be offended if justice is too soft so that the experience of victims means nothing. Versions of an afterlife in which George Pell flies to heaven on the basis of his recitation of the Apostles Creed would fit such a description. We can be offended if the circumstances around a persons life are not taken into account so that a person who steals out of hunger is treated as someone who steals out of greed. We can be offended if justice is arbitrary or cruel such as punishing same sex relationships that bring joy to all involved. We can be offended if justice is so complicated, that everyone is set up to fail and face an eternity of "spiders up the butt", for drinking cows milk, or soy milk, and twice as many spiders for almond milk. This is the system that the characters in the Good Place must challenge and eventually overturn.<br />
<br />
In its final season The Good Place replaces that punitive system with what is essentially a therapeutic model. Instead of the old bad place, people go through scenarios run by rehabilitated demons in which they grow past the reasons why they caused harm with their lives. Its not so much punishment as it is treatment for human toxicity. The conclusion is “universalist” in the sense that everyone eventually gets into the Good Place. As we hear Brent arguing with his spiritual coaches we realise though that this is a longer journey for some than it is for others. Nobody is being tortured though. Nobody is forever excluded from the Good Place either. Judgement isn’t behind those participating in this system.<br />
<br />
Christian Universalism is a belief within Christianity that everyone will be reconciled with God at some point. While it has a very long history in the church it leapt into prominence again in 2011 with the publication of Rob Bell’s book Love Wins. Due to influential commentary on the book Rob Bell gained the title of heretic in some circles and was bid goodbye by people who act as guardians of the evangelical faith. Universalism seems to me to offend people’s need for good to be seperated eternally from evil at a singular judgement point. As I don’t have that need I don’t fully understand it.<br />
<br />
Perhaps the anxiety is that Hitler will be given a house in heaven under this system that they don’t deserve – the offence of too soft justice. However no universalist afterlife (and certainly not the one in the Good Place) suggest this is possible without Hitler first transforming into someone who any Jew would be happy to live next to. I think more likely it is offensive to people trying to get others to turn to salvation right now to suggest that there is no absolute deadline to secure salvation by. Evangelism in particular loses its bite if our death itself doesn't bring on our final judgement.<br />
<br />
Issues of injustice centred around punishment and reward are not the only ways that afterlifes can offend us. The offence that the Good Place provoked in some commentators in its afterlife was the final obliteration of self-hood in the souls journey. At the very end of all things (serious spoiler alert...) the individual ceases to be the individual. The selves we came to know as Eleanor, Tahani, Chidi and Jason concluded their stories as they met their need to grow past self-interested survival or petty competition or paralysing doubt or simply an inability not to combine matches and petrol when left alone with them. They then, after all the time they need and by their own choice, end. This idea of an ultimate end to our self is as offensive to some people as an unjust afterlife.<br />
<br />
Like the offence of universalism this is not an offence I particularly understand. I take solace in the line from Take this Waltz by Leonard Cohen: “Take this Waltz, It’s been dying for years.”; as a reminder that I am familiar with my own ending. The two year old me is in my past. The six year old me is in my past. The 20 year old me is in my past. And so on. They ended and so too will I. I’ve been dying for years. One day finally the last me will die but by then they will probably be unfamiliar in many respects to the me of today.<br />
<br />
Is this sad? Sometimes I find it terribly sad. Not only will I end but all the wonderful people I love will one day have no more versions of themselves in this world. You’d better believe that’s sad. But is this bad? I don’t think so. I come down on the show creators side that death, including ultimate soul death, is essential to valuing life. It is why “every human is a little bit sad all the time, because you know you’re going to die. But that knowledge is what gives life meaning.” (Series 4 Episode 12). I accept though this may just be a rationalisation of an unavoidable reality that I and others will die. If someday we can actually cure death or if an eternal afterlife actually exists I will be interested to see if that does actually turn life into a prison (with or without harps). I do think it might.<br />
<br />
Recently I listened to <a href="https://www.eternitynews.com.au/podcasts/episode-6-with-all-due-respect-on-the-afterlife/">a podcast</a> in which two very different Christian spokespeople both agreed that from a Christian perspective death is bad. They argued that biblically death is not a part of the world until sin wrecks it and that the right way for the world to be is without death. Therefore they believed all death should be railed against and a world without any death at all should be longed for. From this perspective it is actually an end to the soul that is unnatural. This belief in our eternal identities is not always extended to people who go to hell. Their eternal existence is supposedly tortuous and given that non-universalists hold out no hope for their redemption, essentially pointless. Some therefore conclude that denizens of any Bad Place will be annihilated rather than barbarically burnt without dying for ever (a theory called Annihilationism) but that those who are saved by God will live for ever. Whether annihilationist or not the idea is that we are supposed to be eternal and an afterlife with a positive ending of ourself is a depiction that offends against that idea.<br />
<br />
There are any number of additional ways that an afterlife depiction can offend us. I suspect the Trumps of the world would be offended by an afterlife in which there are no walls between rich and poor. People who have prided themselves on knowing theology will be offended by the lack of a doctrinal entrance exam at the end. The Good Place showed us that it is a topic people are interested in enough to devote ourselves to four seasons to. It also showed us that even when nobody is pretending its the truth the afterlife can still offend.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2017-11/6/15/campaign_images/buzzfeed-prod-fastlane-01/13-times-janet-from-the-good-place-really-capture-2-26437-1509999201-14_dblbig.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="415" data-original-width="625" height="212" src="https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2017-11/6/15/campaign_images/buzzfeed-prod-fastlane-01/13-times-janet-from-the-good-place-really-capture-2-26437-1509999201-14_dblbig.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-6651006480139333392020-02-27T18:09:00.000-08:002020-03-06T00:58:41.506-08:00Who can we count on?Recently I got into an argument. I suggested there was only a minority of people who would economically discriminate against same sex couples if emboldened by a government that permitted them to, but that they existed. When pressed on exactly how many people I thought there was who would do such a thing, I said perhaps more than 5% but less than 10%. I was told I was being ridiculous to think there was so many.<br />
<br />
Since that argument I have been pondering. And pondering. When I was in my all boys high school about 30 years ago, a student gave a talk to the class. It was in legal studies and they had to argue for a law that should be changed. They argued that we should be allowed to murder gay people. (Little did they know that the homosexual panic defence as it was called, virtually gave them that licence back then.) The class applauded and the teacher did nothing. I got in trouble for provoking the student who spoke when I blew them kisses as an act of juvenile trolling. It’s a story I’ve told before and it sticks with me. It affects my estimates of the world around me.<br />
<br />
I believe that every student there wasn’t really a killer at heart. Most will have forgotten the event all together by now. Some will be leading happy lives as members of the LGBTIA community. Even the homophobes probably wont want to see gay people murdered. But such belief is not certain. All the evidence I have is my memory of that day and the few students who I have kept up with since then or met long afterwards (and they are fine). Based on that day what percentage of people would actively discriminate against same sex couples if they had a chance? Upwards of 80%. But I believe without evidence that that high an estimate would be ridiculous.<br />
<br />
We all carry around in our heads similar sorts of estimates about our peers. The Security chief at ASIO recently said that <a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6646427/nazis-in-suburbs-are-a-growing-threat-asio/">organised right wing violence in Australia is a growing threat</a>. But how many people are really neo-nazis in Australia? When Australia exported that shooter to New Zealand we were partly shocked that they came from here and we were partly, sadly, not shocked at all. Egg-boy spoke for the majority of us when he egged the Senator who suggested the victims of that massacre were at fault. But that Senator spoke for some people. What percentage? Go on, have a guess.<br />
<br />
Sometimes we get to know people as reasonable, likable and intelligent and then we discover that they think gay people shouldn’t be near kids or that #Metoo is an over-reaction or that the massacres of Aboriginal Australians didn’t happen. We wonder whether our radar that tells us how many people around us think these things is on the blink. We are left suspicious that we are assuming too few people we already know are homophobic, misogynistic, racists. We think we should adjust our estimates upwards.<br />
<br />
This has happened to me recently. I am still processing the details and while it would benefit me to write about them I am not yet ready to. Does it mean that I should dismiss my own estimates of 5-10% homophobes as an over-reaction to recent events? Does it mean that my previous low estimates of homophobia, misogyny and racism in the community around me were too low?<br />
<br />
People who hold homophobic, misogynistic, or racist opinions aren’t even necessarily going to act in those ways. Holocaust denial doesn’t exactly equal a willingness to commit anti-Semitic violence but the two are linked. One is a stepping stone to the other. A boss that thinks #Metoo has gone too far is more likely to let their workplace become unsafe and traumatic for female employees. A community that uses the phrase gay-agenda a lot is more likely to treat a gay person with hostility. At least this is what I think. I rely on this but I don’t know this. This theory of attitudes linked to behavior builds my estimates of who is likely to act in certain ways. I hear homophobic comments from about 5% to 10% of the population so I think about that many people might discriminate against same sex couples.<br />
<br />
This question of what percentage of people are likely to be perpetrators of horrible acts (discrimination right up to murder) is too important to answer in this haphazard anecdotal inferred way. But we just don’t have good research to turn to instead. Consider sexual harassment. Most women have experienced this. In fact I am probably being overly cautious by not just saying all women have experienced sexual harassment. Many men have experienced it too. But what percentage of people, by gender as that would be relevant, commit sexual harassment? Or have committed it at least once? We have much better statistics and research answering how many people have been victims than questions about the number of perpetrators.<br />
<br />
More than one in 20 Australians have been physically attacked because of their race. That is a shocking statistic and comes from the Australian Human Rights Commission. In 2019 the ABC Australia Talks survey found 75% of respondents thought Australia was racist. But being racist isn’t necessarily physically attacking and how many Australians did those people mean were racists? Consider a specific pragmatic question; If someone was perpetrating racist violence I think 99%, maybe 99.9% of people could be relied on to support the victim in some way (call the police, if not intervene). I think we should be shocked by anyone choosing to support the perpetrator. But I am guessing. I am not basing this on any facts.<br />
<br />
If I was one of those one in 20 Australians who had copped an assault based on my race, guessing that most people around me aren’t like my assailant (even if they are a little bit racist) is a tough ask. Someone who hasn’t experienced such violence certainly shouldn’t be insisting upon such an attitude. It might even be that those of us who haven’t experienced such violence have a very false sense that the willingness to support such violence is rarer than it is. I don’t really know.<br />
<br />
Christian thinking is sometimes quite pessimistic about human nature. When the traveler in the parable of the Good Samaritan lies wounded, three people pass before one stops to help. Some Christian thinkers have gone on to claim humans by default are inherently rebellious and selfish. In other places though the Bible assumes basic human goodness. “Which of you,” Jesus asks rhetorically, “would give your child a stone when they ask for bread?” Psychology offers us better tools for understanding whether people have a dominant tendency for good or ill but the answer is complex and dependent on many factors. Sometimes evil is just people fitting in with the crowd, like those high school boys who applauded that legal studies talk 30 years ago. And the crowd can go either way.<br />
<br />
We are all guessing in the dark about how scared and how trusting we ought to be of each other. So here is what we can do; we can advertise where we stand. Returning to the original discussion which was about the Australian governments religious discrimination bill, if Churches want people to know that they have no interest in discriminating against same sex couples, stick a rainbow flag in your window. Its not novel. I'm a little over rainbows graphically speaking. But people know what the rainbow flag indicates. If you don’t want to do that don’t get all huffy if people who have experienced homophobia from churches are suspicious of you. You can’t even put a sticker up.<br />
<br />
Likewise if a boss wants their employers to know that sexual harassment is not tolerated then this should be said. It should be said a lot. Of course words must be followed up by actions when harassment occurs but lets not assume that victims know their bosses are on the same page as them. How would they know? Likewise for schools that want Aboriginal families to know their culture will be accommodated and celebrated; stick a bloody poster up saying exactly that. No that’s not the last thing to do but its an obvious start.<br />
<br />
You will hear online a lot of criticism of “virtue signalling” when people advertise their progressive attitudes in lieu of doing anything else for others. But virtue signalling is only that when it is fake and hypocritical and when its purpose is to make the speaker feel good even at the expense of the experiences of victims. Advertising where you stand is something valuable when it takes into account the needs of victims for reassurance. It relieves those who have the most to lose from doing some of the initial mental work of figuring out if they can count on you.<br />
<br />
True story: I knew someone who was very white. He shaved his head because he liked having a shaved head. Then Romper Stomper, the movie about racist white skin-heads in Melbourne, came out. He noticed people were anxious around him especially anyone who looked Asian. So he bought a t-shirt that showed someone binning a swastika and bore the slogan “No Racism”. He was a very wise guy.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-73346882845102116372020-01-30T18:46:00.000-08:002020-01-30T19:27:42.699-08:00The World We Resist.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/8-r-V0uK4u0/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8-r-V0uK4u0?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
A long time ago I went to a wedding. As I recall it, the minister who officiated stood aside for the sermon to let a younger hipper minister take over. Although we were Catholics by upbringing on the grooms side and the bride was an evangelical Christian I guess they presumed that many in the audience were un-churched or de-churched or in some way not particularly Christian. This young hip minister knew exactly how to reach us though. The gospel was relayed to us using the timely (this was back in the 90’s) analogy of Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant’s split.<br />
<br />
Now if you have no idea about that split spare yourself the details. It’s just celebrity gossip and now terribly dated as well. I mention the story because it represents a misunderstanding that can occur in church cultures about the irreligious or even just those they think are slightly less religious. People can think we are into the most superficial crap they can imagine. Celebrities. Selfies. <a href="https://au.thegospelcoalition.org/article/the-end-of-secular-babies/">Not having babies so that we can have fame and material success.</a> They presume we are both very casual about sex and yet obsessed by it. We are secular culture or <a href="https://stephenmcalpine.com/?s=sexular">sexual culture</a> even.<br />
<br />
To understand this we need to look at the underlying myth of “the world.” The world, from which we get the negative descriptor of worldliness, has a particular meaning in Christian thinking. It is not merely the same as the earth – a planet we live on. The world is human society but not exactly. Human societies can be distinguished by their differences. Human societies have conflicting values across time and place and even in the same time and place. The world is either a reduction, or a projection, of diverse human societies into one consistent phenomenon shaped by inherent selfishness and a desire to rebel against God.<br />
<br />
Let me explain what I mean by a projection. By projection I’m allowing for the possible meaning of the world to be a potential future or even a primordial past that is present as either destiny or cause of human society but is not the sum total of what human society is presently. With this description it is still possible to recognise both the good and bad and diversity of human societies because all present societies are becoming either more or less like the world and potentially in different ways.<br />
<br />
I want to be as fair as possible to the Christian concept of the world. In doing so I must also note that there are echoes of this concept in all heroic imaginings. The rationalist who views critical thinking and hard evidence as the cornerstones of progress will contrast their own cause with a world that is shallow in its thinking, motivated largely by the pursuit of comfort and conformity. Although they might not use the term they are saying something similar to “the world” when they describe the Dunning Kruger effect or confirmation bias. Here the rationalist may view themselves as having escaped the world fully but the more critical will be aware that they share its weakness and try to police them.<br />
<br />
This rationalists translation of the Christian world however might be better called psychology. Like the Buddhist idea of the human dilemma there is no sense that walking away from crowds will diminish the problem of mind the rationalist wants to overcome. By contrast the Christian notion of the world is social. For the Christian there might be a human psychology (or inherent sinfulness) that cannot be withdrawn from, that recreates the world, but there is also a sense that the flaws of individual psychology are amplified in the world or that the world manufactures flaws that a solitary human could not.<br />
<br />
This resembles more closely Marxist ideas of how people are alienated within economies and how dominant ideologies in society become paradigms that we can’t even see. For example everything is reduced to property under capitalism so that perceiving land without an owner (even a state owner) becomes impossible. When such a system produces injustices it can be difficult to identify anyone who is responsible. Certainly the landlord who rents a house at unaffordable rents is not held responsible for homelessness when they are simply following the market rate. Neither is the train station guard who tells the homeless person that they can’t sleep in the doorway they’ve chosen. Everyone is simply complying with the dictates of property. This sounds very similar to the Christian concept of the world ; a totalising cultural phenomenon that is hard to resist. The world can be a useful concept for naming the “water we swim in” culturally.<br />
<br />
As much as the world can help us bring to light unseen cultural trends it can also be a concept that goes sour very easily. This occurs when the world and the church are understood as two distinct spaces in their current form. The church then becomes code for us (if you are a believer) while the world is them. Us and them. So let’s look at the ways that Us and them thinking about the church and the world goes wrong.<br />
<br />
1. It misses a call to deeper difference with the world.<br />
Churches which hold to us and them thinking about the church and the world need to focus on superficial matters where they can draw clear distinctions. Once upon a time they might have used divorce or sex before marriage as a mark of distinction but increasingly they can’t because there are unmarried and remarried parents in their pews. Instead now they might talk about hook up culture or porn use or acts of piety like church attendance. Meanwhile the church and its’ members accumulate property, and otherwise live as parts of the political economy just like citizens of the world. On average church attendees give more to charity but as they pursue political and economic power and security with the excuse that they have the right to like any other group, the way they distinguish themselves from the world is a missed opportunity for challenge.<br />
<br />
2. It at least appears to be astonishing in its ignorance of church failure.<br />
Our Prime minister, Scott Morrison, made a big deal of his Christian faith in the lead up to the election. He is defending the most blatant practice of pork barrelling by any Australian government as I write this. Of course child abuse in the church has been a national scandal with our highest profile sex abuser, Archbishop Pell, being defended in character by our most well known Methodist, Ex-PM John Howard. The notion that the church and the world in their present forms are the contrast between Gods way and the highway cannot be believed. I believe Christians who make that sort of claim generally mean the Church as it should be rather than how it is, but if this is not made clear the effect is to seem blind to injustice enacted by their own tribe.<br />
<br />
3. It is astonishing in its ignorance of what is happening outside the church.<br />
When Church voices draw a distinction between church and world as two separable places in their current form they have to paint the secular world as devoid of hope and virtue. This is the concern that prompted my writing. I am so tired of people in church talking about secular people as “the selfie generation” without any irony. It honestly feels like the authors of those comments caught an ad for a mainstream television reality show and figured that’s what everyone outside the church is like. Their benchmark for assessing popular culture is the Kardashians. But if you are generally concerned with opposing vapidity in culture how is it that you haven’t found any of the allies in all the spaces outside of church? Just talk to young people themselves and you will find many who don’t want mobile phones or are unimpressed with social media and celebrity culture. In another example every Christmas there are numerous voices from Christians and non-Christians wanting to simplify and move away from consumptive consumerism, and seeking to make the season kinder to planet and the poor. But to hear some Christian speakers use of the world, its as if secular society is all lining up for the sales while in contrast Christians reflect on the incarnation. What a missed opportunity for alliances.<br />
<br />
Even worse is the attribution of millennial frustrations to selfishness and cultural priorities. Why aren’t non-churched people having kids? It would have to be a desire for fame, fortune and freedom instead... and a lack of hope. It couldn’t be a decline in real wages and a housing market that is an investors playground. Could it? OK Boomer.<br />
<br />
4. It’s vague as all hell and can easily be an excuse for blind bigotry.<br />
The call to be unlike the world can be misapplied to suggest that any compromise of rigid fundamentalism for compassion or common sense is a compromise with the world for worldly gain. Zippers on pants instead of good honest buttons? Contraception? “Secular” movies and music? Women priests? Blessing same sex relationships? Anything can be worldly if you don’t like it.<br />
If a person wants to argue against those things then they should develop arguments unpolluted by just labeling something worldly.<br />
<br />
Worse still the term worldly can be used to dog-whistle one’s prejudices without actually having the courage to express them or to sound like you mean different things to different audiences for maximum appeal. The hypocrisy of this frankly cowardly approach to preaching is that it uses the rhetoric of radical bravery as it makes supposedly challenging calls to reject the world. Meanwhile everybody gets to decide what that means for them while looking down on others who decide differently.<br />
<br />
I hope some of what I’ve written inspires the Christians I know to challenge how the concept of the world is used in their own and their peers rhetoric. To non- Christians reading this please know many Christians are not actually like the preacher from Footloose, there are Christians I know who are ACDC fans, avid board-gamers, into musical theatre, or complete nerds about anime, but it can be hard to confront how the world is used negatively by Christian leaders and teachers particularly when it is all dog-whistle and lack of detail.<br />
<br />
Lastly this isn’t just a problem for Christians. The idea of the world can take many forms. From my own left wing perspective I should be critical of what I see as the path capitalism paves for our culture without needing to think every participant in it is corrupted by it and that every product of capitalism is entirely destructive. The four errors I mentioned above can easily be made by me. In a sense the world is always both present and being resisted at the same time and moving beyond simplicity is necessary for us all.Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-58366196226875886802018-07-02T20:30:00.003-07:002018-07-02T20:58:58.733-07:00In Solidarity with Myself: A Reflection on Passing as a Catholic Teacher.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ3bVWpHab59BkgUUGoFYRngjhcwf_c6X5x-TsKMCXvxVdAbggt9unc47lYy0e99EU1V-ueocoiORXxWPQKxYziuPqrj7wU48zbXs3VI5kG-Gk3QanRBEJgH9eVgLH8jPIA29tfKv1lVFz/s1600/JobInterview1.webp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="1200" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ3bVWpHab59BkgUUGoFYRngjhcwf_c6X5x-TsKMCXvxVdAbggt9unc47lYy0e99EU1V-ueocoiORXxWPQKxYziuPqrj7wU48zbXs3VI5kG-Gk3QanRBEJgH9eVgLH8jPIA29tfKv1lVFz/s400/JobInterview1.webp" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
I am a teacher. I currently travel an hour down country roads to work as a casual relief teacher at a public school in a small town. I would like to work closer to home so as to be more present for my family. Many people ask me if I have looked for work at the local Catholic high schools. I did once a long time ago but I haven’t since my last period of employment.<br />
<br />
I would, for the most part, enjoy working at a Catholic school. I often mention how Catholic schools are ahead of public schools in terms of incorporating Australian Aboriginal perspectives in their curriculum. I believe education is a part of our fulfillment of our duty to the needs of others, not just a ticket to our own increased personal income and broadly speaking that is the Catholic ethos too. Lastly I like teaching kids in any environment. I could focus on them and not on all the policies of the church running the show.<br />
<br />
But if I went for a job at a Catholic school I would have to accept a certain level of discrimination in my hiring and my retention of the job, discrimination that would be illegal in the public school system. This means that effectively in regards to employment at a Catholic school I will get preferential treatment for my heterosexual marriage compared to anyone who is gay or in a defacto relationship. Due to my Catholic upbringing I could also pretend to be Catholic. I look like a married Catholic man with kids – just the sort of person that would appropriately reflect the values and tone of the school.<br />
<br />
This picture isn’t telling you my truth. I am married, now. We had our two children first, “in sin” and married when it felt right for both of us. So you know that I had sex outside of marriage. Some of that sex was also with other blokes. I’ve also comfortably been an ex- Catholic for a long time. I can still recall most of the prayers but I parted company with the church when it struck me that I wouldn’t even join a stamp collecting club if it only allowed men in its government let alone a world religion. About the only time I rediscover my Catholic identity is if someone generalizes unfairly about Catholics and I feel a need to rebut them. “We don’t actually eat babies”, I say, arms momentarily linked with my Catholic kin.<br />
<br />
To take and hold a job at a Catholic school would necessarily involve “passing” as someone I am not. I want to discuss this concept of “passing” in depth. For some of you it’s a familiar concept and this essay probably isn’t for you. For others it may name clearly something that pervades your life that you’ve lacked a word for. For others still you may have only a limited experience of passing and little idea that it can be harmful. I first heard the word passing when it was used to describe when transgender people successfully convince society that they are a cisgender member of the gender they are transitioning to. In my early twenties I myself could cross dress to pass, meaning I could convince people that I was a biological woman by simply changing my appearance. Passing is also used when older people try to look younger. Passing could be used in the context of prosthetics to describe a limb that looks like one of flesh and blood. People with mental illnesses often find sophisticated ways of passing as well in order to avoid medical interventions or social stigma.<br />
<br />
Passing generally operates inside social hierarchies as a way to gain social benefits. An older woman may try to pass as younger to avoid age discrimination in a job interview. A young person may mask their disability to avoid social stigma and pity. Gay men might pass as straight to avoid homophobia. Failing to pass means failing to obtain the rights and privileges of passing. At the pointy end this means safety from violence – to pass as cisgender is decidedly safer in our world than to be noticeably transgender. Passing is often not that hard because passing is fitting in with the expectations of a society that doesn’t want to notice your complexity, or difficulty or sadness or uniqueness or “wrongness” in their eyes. Passing is the culturally smoother outcome for everyone.<br />
<br />
We all pass, or try to. We do it strategically and yet as easily as paying someone a basic courtesy. We smile when we are down. Doing so allows us to breeze through an interaction at the checkout counter. We don’t have to deal with other people’s concern for our welfare and they don’t have to deal with their concern either. It’s handy. We gain the benefits of everyone thinking we’re ok. Passing doesn’t necessarily make us a victim of oppression or bound by the shackles of society. It can just be a way to navigate social environments simply and to choose when to be open and with whom.<br />
<br />
We are also however obliged to pass and that is much more toxic to tolerate. Women in particular can be told to smile as they walk along by complete strangers. Is the male issuer of this decree asking the woman to pass as the pretty young thing he would like to see rather than her actual self? I doubt its been reflected on that deeply, but the effect is the same. Thank goodness for all the women who don’t try to “fight ageing”, fake a smile and laugh off harassment or for that matter eliminate body and facial hair. By refusing to pass as someone else’s ideal they open up space for every other woman not to.<br />
<br />
I want to stress that when we make efforts to pass, even in capitulation to others threats or demands, it is not fair to say that we are closing off space for others. The people who oblige passing do that with their commands and their criticisms. The people who threaten violence or discrimination to those who don’t pass or try to pass do that. People attempting to pass are simply living their lives as strategically as they can, perhaps even with safety in mind. Still, if we are successful the consequences of not passing will pass over us and hit others who are less successful. This is why in oppressed communities people who can pass as not belonging to that community are not always trusted as allies. They possess a privilege that isn’t healthy to use and might only work partially but is still real.<br />
<br />
I could easily pass as someone who holds Catholic values about the expression of sexuality and the meaning of marriage (although curious minds might wonder how we stopped at two kids). I could mention my family to my students without concern. In fact, for me, it takes extraordinary effort to not pass. I have to pretty much “come out” as not who I look like if I want people to know. But I think its important to do this. Boringly, I have probably “come out” as having a queer past on this blog more times than I remember. That is me trying not to pass as what I look like. That is me trying to hold open the spaces for others and myself to be different. It’s healthy for me to do this but I’ll concede it becomes a tad repetitive.<br />
<br />
There’s also a complex space I inhabit where my queer past isn’t really my true self either. I would feel wrong if I placed myself on a panel as a queer speaker. I don’t feel I can claim to speak from that position. I am married, in a marriage that doesn’t have to argue with anyone for recognition. Holding hands with my partner doesn’t put me at extra risk of violence. This is not because I am passing as straight but because my current expression of my sexuality is straight. In all this talk of passing in order to work at a Catholic school I don’t want to understate my heterosexual priveleges (or desire) or deny the oppressions of others. Sometimes it can be hard to divide what priveleges we obtain by virtue of who we are, and what privileges we obtain by passing as something we are not. Men after all gain privileges for being men but often only if they can pass as what society values men as (masculine, brave, tough) which is never really their whole truth.<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg51CbXfw-lMmWFdOkG7OnBRloFNUmIPT7NsrRqEoOPaw4q0TxetttnegtmHCGSagZtGzzkHkEIYwoX2e9Jvy5mo2zDb_NYFsDBeoHOI7RJpS6TxBADhjLv2gQty_wB7HC6wG3241dxqSi9/s1600/fuckgenderroles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="493" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg51CbXfw-lMmWFdOkG7OnBRloFNUmIPT7NsrRqEoOPaw4q0TxetttnegtmHCGSagZtGzzkHkEIYwoX2e9Jvy5mo2zDb_NYFsDBeoHOI7RJpS6TxBADhjLv2gQty_wB7HC6wG3241dxqSi9/s320/fuckgenderroles.jpg" width="246" /></a><br />
There are many critical responses to “passing”. For example, there are transgender theorists who argue “passing” only reinforces gender based oppression. To pass as a woman one needs to embrace the icky politics of narrow definitions of visually being a woman. When I passed as a woman the easiest way to do this was to remove any facial, leg and underarm hair. These cues, plus socks in a bra, was enough for a young man with longish hair in dim light to pass as female. What does this say however about women’s body hair? Why couldn’t I have been read as a woman with unshaved underarms? To do so would have risked not passing. I made a choice to pass first. And then later I didn’t by embracing they style of “Gender-fuck”.<br />
<br />
Within transgender politics one expression of gender identity has deliberately tried to challenge the value of passing. “Gender-fuck” is the colloquial term for transgressing gendered appearance rules in order to show them up as arbitrary and even to highlight their absurdity. The goal of gender-fuck is to create confusion in the reading of the person as male or female rather than to be successfully read as either one. There have always been spaces in culture for people playing this role – The bearded lady in the circus or the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. If punk is a movement fueled by positive rebellion Gender-fuck is when Punk meets drag. I remember my days at uni in an a-frame frock with ripped up sleeves and facial hair as more freeing than dressing in any other way. I’ve yet to find a place of employment where this exact outfit would feel appropriate though. What I really enjoyed was abandoning the goal of passing as anything.<br />
<br />
I want to be clear that I’m not saying every dress choice we make is either an attempt to pass or a rebellion against passing. A lot of our self representation choices have no relationship to passing as anything. Nowadays I wear a tie to work almost every day. This is my way of reminding myself that the students I work with in an underprivileged state school deserve as much professionalism as those at the local hoity-toity private school which would require a tie of me. I don’t think this choice can be understood through the lens of passing. I’m not trying to pass as a guy with my tie. I have a moustache that genders me perfectly well on its own and my reason for keeping that has its own story. I hope I haven’t held up passing as the way to understand all choices about appearance.<br />
<br />
When we do attempt to pass the effect can be toxic. This is because when we aspire to present an image for others we can internalize the message that our truth is something to be ashamed of. I don’t want to generalize too much here. I think I personally have a very low tolerance for passing. I am inclined to interrogate myself as to why I might be keeping anything private from my friends and I don’t enjoy the suspicion that I am doing so in order to avoid their judgment. Other people I know seem to have a higher tolerance for passing. They like their privacy. They don’t mind wearing a mask to maintain it. I found being a waiter the hardest job because even when you are having a lousy day you are supposed to convince customers you are totally loving your job. As a teacher or as a drug and alcohol worker or as a school cleaner I have never felt the same pressure to pass as happy. This doesn’t make me better than people who can cope being a waiter. Frankly I think they have wisdom I lack.<br />
<br />
My intolerance of passing is a key reason why I don’t want to work at a Catholic school. In the public system I don’t burden my current co-workers or employer with my life story but I don’t have any fear of them finding out. I don’t feel like mentioning my wife in the staff room is part of a ploy to fit in. I believe in public secular education for a lot of reasons but I don’t think the Catholic education system is bad by comparison. At a state school I don’t need to pass to work there though. At a Catholic school I would feel like I need to out myself constantly or be taken for someone I’m not.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-68588123418050345862018-05-03T21:07:00.001-07:002018-05-03T21:07:55.680-07:00Missing Church<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjftRwDqWLC-s2N0qQT15t7nTXnzALdfq0L-LESq4icSmXtGd93MiDrPDdLEzS_JsA9j7MEHONceq7STqWyiqCT-pcxq2tsxSPsVZfwIoQbbMdzfhMCw4mn3eXN3iY7aZ_s83KAEB9Z6POV/s1600/st.matts.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjftRwDqWLC-s2N0qQT15t7nTXnzALdfq0L-LESq4icSmXtGd93MiDrPDdLEzS_JsA9j7MEHONceq7STqWyiqCT-pcxq2tsxSPsVZfwIoQbbMdzfhMCw4mn3eXN3iY7aZ_s83KAEB9Z6POV/s320/st.matts.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lately I have had a falling out with Christianity. Not a
falling out with Christians, family or friends, but a grumpy disappointment
with the theology of it. This is a not new cycle for me and not especially
unique to Christianity. I’ve invested in and then fallen out with Buddhism and
the Tarot in the past. It seems like I put a lot of hope into something being
the something that makes sense of everything and then, crash, it fails to
support the weight I’ve given it. I then resent the philosophy for fooling me
about its flaws when I know, to be fair, I fooled myself.<br />
<br />
Non-Christian friends have asked me in the past why I put so much effort into
understanding Christianity. Part of it is that I am not an ideologue about
religion – despite how I may sound at times. When my partners parents are over
I like to remember to offer that we say grace before dinner. And in return they
have never batted an eyelid when we don’t. I don’t get angry at people who
express thanks to God for saving them from a hurricane the way some non-believers
do because I don’t think that person is really saying God blessed them and
cursed others. I think they’re just grateful –as I would be if a flying car
missed my head and my partners head and my kids heads. I also think a lot of religious
concepts – even hell – are useful philosophically – even if I don’t think they
are physically real. I don’t, as I have said many times, think whether a person
believes in God or not matters that much. I don’t think our opinions on God’s
existence need to divide us or can meaningfully unite us either.<br />
<br />
On top of this I believe in community. I believe our society is stupidly atomized
into nuclear families which are themselves disintegrating in favour of the
individual. There are positives to individualism, don’t get me wrong. I think
certain calls for a return to the glory days of arranged marriages as a fix to
individualism are bound up in those speakers blind privilege. Long live
individualism in romance. Go for it Jack and Rose (Titanic movie reference). But
economic individualism is something else. When you can find families where one sibling
is wealthy while another is in crushing debt, what hope do we have of ever
reducing the chasm between rich and poor in wider society? Wealth inequality is
the worst it has ever been in human history and getting worse. I believe it is,
on a structural level, threatening our planet and all life on it. We need to
all get in the same boat economically or more and more people will keep
drowning.<br />
<br />
So when I’m not an ideologue about religion and I believe in community why
wouldn’t I go to church? Churches are one of the few remaining non-capitalist
spaces left – ignoring for a second the huckster variants with their miracles
for sale. In a church you can’t buy anyone’s approval and you can’t not afford
to attend. There is a general inclination towards collectivism. When a church
holds a lunch its not usually bring your own or sausages for individual sale. The
food is on the table for everyone and the costs are covered by donation. If the
dishes need doing then everyone can pitch in and while this can lead to women
pitching in more than men that’s a charge that can be leveled at any community and
it can be challenged at church. In some churches at least, there is a strong
desire to tackle decisions collectively, and powerful checks on ego and hierarchy.
I don’t bother with churches with a clerical authority. My time in the Catholic
tradition is done. But there are those that rotate worship leaders and value
discussion over preaching at a congregation. It’s like a commune of like minded
people.<br />
<br />
The dilemma is, that I am not so like-minded as the rest. <st1:place w:st="on">Lot</st1:place>’s
of churches include a diversity of views. Some church goers were among those
who recently voted yes for same sex marriage while others voted no. All Churches
with <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>male only clergy would include some
members for women’s ordination. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not
every Christian has the same attitude to the bible. Not every Christian has the
same idea of the afterlife or how prayer is supposed to work or what a
Christian life should look like. But generally every Christian has a respectful
attitude towards the Bible, as a place they want to return to for inspiration,
if not instruction. Generally every Christian believes in an afterlife and with
that an eternal nature to the soul. Generally every Christian considers Jesus uniquely
special, not just part of a pantheon of good guys along with Robin Hood and Jim
Henson. Generally every Christian wants to check their life in with a being or
at least force they call God so that they can be living on the right track,
either through prayer or biblical study or reflecting on God or some
combination of these. I don’t. <br />
<br />
The one hesitation I feel when writing “I don’t” to the above generalities
about Christians is that I would like to <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>check in with God. And by God I mean a loosely
fluid concept representing “goodness”. Checking in with goodness to see if I am
doing good in the world is certainly one reason why I have gone to church in
the past. I am inclined to laziness and self-importance. I need to check in
somehow. But checking in with goodness is fundamentally not the same as
checking in with God. Or maybe it could be but while it has felt similar enough
in the past to make attending church useful it now feels different enough to
make sharing that checking in with Christians not helpful. I’m not so sure God,
real or not, is so good.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
All of this might change. I might go back to church next week and if I did I
know I would be welcomed without question. There would be a morning tea of
shared food and if I brought something it would be accepted and if I forgot to
bring anything it would not be thought of. A group of people I count as friends
would be there, noticing if I was down or bringing their own need to the group.
The Bible would be consulted to seek out God’s loving plan to restore a just
world. Connected to this there might be a chance to reflect on how to be a part
of that plan in relation to refugees, or the environment or the neglected and
isolated people in our community. Songs would be sung, lamentations over
injustice, or praises of a sacrificial God. Maybe a collection plate would be
passed around but without obligation or even pressure. People would ask the
group to pray for themselves or for others and the group would do so without
haste. <br />
<br />
Sometimes I think some of my atheist friends think that church is where
Christians go to hang out and loudly judge those who aren’t there, especially
atheists. I think some services in some more fundy churches I have attended in the
past resembled that but its truly not a common form. The church I have attended
till recently (can I still say “my” church?) has never, ever done that. People
value their time there, for themselves, as a place to challenge their own flaws,
way too much. Likewise it isn’t because I think I am flawless that I haven’t
been attending church. I don’t feel that church is currently the best way for
me to check those flaws but if you, whatever your beliefs, think joining a
church community might be for you, I would definitely recommend St. Matthews in
Long Gully, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Bendigo</st1:city></st1:place>.
You might see me there, but I currently wouldn’t expect to. Enjoy the morning
tea.</div>
<br />Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-18341280493851510742018-02-04T20:18:00.003-08:002018-02-04T21:28:45.764-08:00Against whom have I sinned? Part 2.<div class="MsoNormal">
In my<a href="http://humblewonderful.blogspot.com.au/2018/01/against-whom-have-i-sinned.html"> last post </a>I presented the problem of how a particular Christian
understanding of “sin” can be used to overlook victims. The specific sins I am
considering here are those with human victims; murder, assault, unjust incarceration.
I claim that it is necessary within Christianity to rationalize God as the sole
or primary offended party when people commit such sin, in order to give God,
through Jesus, the prerogative to forgive such sin completely. I concluded
however with the recognition that many passionate Christians do acknowledge
human victims indicating that they have an understanding of sin and of God’s
offence that overcomes the problem I outlined.<br />
<br />
A recent news event and its discussion is worth mentioning here. Rachael
Denhollander was a victim of Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse while a young girl. She
was also the first to publicly accuse him. At Larry Nassar’s sentencing hearing
Denhollander gave a powerful impact statement which “went viral” in Christian
media circles. Rachael expressed in <a href="http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/january-web-only/rachael-denhollander-larry-nassar-forgiveness-gospel.html">a follow up interview</a> how she knows first
hand the glibness that the Christian doctrine of forgiveness can express
towards victims and even how it can be used as a weapon to minimize their
abuse. Rachel Denhollander is clear that her own understanding of forgiveness “means that I trust in God’s justice and I release bitterness and anger and a desire for personal vengeance. It does not mean that I minimize or mitigate or excuse what he has done. It does not mean that I pursue justice on earth any less zealously.”<br />
<br />
When I read Denhollander's words and when I learn of her actions in bringing Nassar to justice as well as exposing other abuses and supporting other victims, I feel like its better for anyone to read her words over mine on this matter.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/v4aekQwKIKs/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v4aekQwKIKs?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
I’ll go on though, because I want to outline very clearly an alternative
understanding of the mechanism of sin and forgivenenss that Christians can take
up. Denhollander has reinforced for me how relevant this is to changing how
churches respond to institutional abuse. Firstly it is not necessary to
consider God’s forgiveness as sufficient for all matters. A person who kills
another person may be forgiven by God for the pertinent offence to God (harming
their creation or disobeying God’s laws), but this does not remove their
obligations to the victim, the victim's family or their community. To express
this it is important to avoid language suggesting that, through contrition
before God, a person “wipes their slate clean” or in any similar metaphor
renders their situation as if the sin had not happened. This is not the situation for victims. It could even be stated
that a consequence of being right with God would be a desire of a perpetrator
to meet their obligations to any victims.<br />
<br />
Some objectors to this might raise passages such as Psalm 41 which led me to
this topic in my last post, as if they “proved” God is the only offended party
to sin. A careful reading however reminds us that Psalm 41 is simply a prayer
made by King David. King David’s self-serving belief that God is the only one
he has sinned against should come as no surprise from such a flawed character. It
is an example of an appeal to cheap grace from someone who consistently tries
to play God like a slot machine. In 2 Samuel:12 we see David employing
contrition towards God in a frankly cynical way (while sadly God in patriarchal
fashion punishes David through his child). David is supposed to be read as a
dick and there’s no reason even a biblical fundamentalist has to assume he gets
God perfectly. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
No biblical Christian is justified using Psalm 41 as instruction over the more relevant Matthew
5:23-24. Here Jesus separates out making oneself right with God, through temple
sacrifices, and making oneself right with another person. Jesus puts the latter
first as a requirement of the former, reversing the normal hierarchy of
importance. It is presented as if approaching God for forgiveness of sin makes
no sense while in conflict with one’s “brother or sister.” This is a position
that is radically at odds with David’s God-alone strategy of seeking
forgiveness.<br />
<br />
<i>“Therefore, if you are offering your gift
at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something
against you,<b><sup> </sup></b>leave your gift there in front of the
altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.”<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What does this say about the nature of God and sin? I find
the idea of a God who refuses to be used to clear someone’s slate while they
continue to offend others a powerful one. It is certainly an empowering one for
victims.<br />
<br />
One of the recommendations of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse is that the Catholic church removes the promise of secrecy from the rite of confession in matters involving child victims. This has been initially rejected by the Church hierarchy in Australia. If we accept that genuine forgiveness of sins requires the victims engagement and in cases of child abuse the community is also the victim, then the position of the Catholic church should be that absolution is always withheld unless a confession of sexual abuse is also made to the police. It follows then that, even if the secrecy of the confession is held to by the church, priests can be prevented from practicing as priests after confessing to sexual abuse. They either accept criminal prosecution or they must be considered unrepentant of a mortal sin by their peers and cannot officiate mass.<br />
<br />
This may seem like an unnecessarily convoluted thought process to reach a simple conclusion; You can’t just go to God (or God’s representative), obtain your forgiveness and then your victims must catch up to the new reality of your sinlessness. Any path to atonement with God is rather through a genuine encounter with the reality of your victims and all the resulting consequences of that. Anything else is cheap grace at their expense. At times I have felt that discussing the theology of how this works is more words than needed but I have had the words of Denhollander in mind:<br />
<br />
“But often, if not always, people are motivated by poor theology and a poor understanding of grace and repentance and that causes them to handle sexual assault in a way where that (sic) a lot of predators go unchecked, often for decades. When you see a theological commitment to handling sexual assault inappropriately, you have the least hope of ever changing it.”<br />
<br />
And so we must first change the theologies of sin and forgiveness that don't put victims first.<br />
<br /></div>
Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-45145082441959137522018-01-20T18:32:00.000-08:002018-01-21T14:30:24.315-08:00Against whom have I sinned?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvc5eIiF06n6dmK_XihpTTv6SKzQpWbtYvGN_JstpmobIKOyAZYL51kfrbHfHX7Iv2dx4_g0BaYPxWeymx2IVJM6CxaFMdOFahNgolcX8iGgLSrylr274Xn-mwJy6i18Gr_Od79Dn3JBRP/s1600/i-have-sinned-17-638.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="374" data-original-width="638" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvc5eIiF06n6dmK_XihpTTv6SKzQpWbtYvGN_JstpmobIKOyAZYL51kfrbHfHX7Iv2dx4_g0BaYPxWeymx2IVJM6CxaFMdOFahNgolcX8iGgLSrylr274Xn-mwJy6i18Gr_Od79Dn3JBRP/s320/i-have-sinned-17-638.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Psalm 51 is a prayer of the Jewish King David. His rule, if such a person existed, would have been about 1000 BCE and is considered a Golden Age of ancient Jewish civilization. This is the same David who, in his most famous legend, slays Goliath with a sling. In Psalm 51 (included below) he prays to God for mercy. As he does so David expresses particular views about sin which I heard quoted by the contemporary theologian D.A. Carson, causing me to revisit this psalm.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://tollelege.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/god-is-always-the-most-offended-by-d-a-carson/">D.A. Carson stated</a> that in every occasion of sin, God is the primary (David says only) offended party. As the primary or only offended party (and this distinction in effect isn’t clear) God has the moral right to punish sinners and the capacity to pardon them independently of any human victims. King David in Psalm 51 asks God to be cleansed of his sin like contemporary Christians are invited to do, with the full confidence that this is God’s prerogative. God could not do this unless they were functionally the only offended party; another could still righteously pass their own judgment.<br />
<br />
The first point I want to make about this theology is that much depends on what is meant by “offended” when we say God is an offended party to sin. One way this has been understood is that sin is a breaking of God’s rules and that this offence of disobedience is the way in which God is offended. If this is the way God’s offence is understood then it should raise some questions. How could the person of God be more offended for having their commands disobeyed over the direct victim of an assault for example? If sexual harassment occurred in a workplace would we say that the boss, whose rules for workplace conduct have been transgressed, is the most offended party? Imagine such a boss informing the victim that they have forgiven the perpetrator so everything is good now. We would understandably balk at this. Even though we should recognise that the boss has independently been betrayed by the harassing employee and could independently insist on punishment they are certainly not the only offended party. The victim of the harassment has an independent claim for restitution or punishment.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmufNJPc4_ebC1tL_LRvM1UVsvgN2t7x8SH28m6IschH5IkW9lhCtSh03GCetvnObF3KPYHflzP-GCSf7er7gHe-mEhscBhnLaja48XV_pecTObNvletS0w1WfVZmWFo8W75gV-UPGxB6U/s1600/doll.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="638" data-original-width="960" height="132" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmufNJPc4_ebC1tL_LRvM1UVsvgN2t7x8SH28m6IschH5IkW9lhCtSh03GCetvnObF3KPYHflzP-GCSf7er7gHe-mEhscBhnLaja48XV_pecTObNvletS0w1WfVZmWFo8W75gV-UPGxB6U/s200/doll.jpg" width="200" /></a>Another way of understanding God as the offended party is to state that we, along with all creation, are God’s property. Thus any transgression against us is against our author/owner rather than ourselves. If I enter your house and destroy your couch there can be no sense that the couch is an offended party. Only you are. Consistently if a person decides to destroy their own couch then there is no offence at all. To accept this paradigm, where God is the functionally only offended party by virtue of our possession by God, is to deny our personhood. (Moral personhood is a term for how a person is delineated from a thing in morality.) I condemn as barbaric when harm to children or wives counts only as harm to their patriarch (and owner) in some cultural circumstances. I insist upon the moral personhood of all. Are we supposed to accept via an analagous patriarchal logic that as children of God we have no independent personhood?<br />
<br />
It should be acknowledged that to say we are not people in relation to another human person, is not the same thing as saying we are not a person in relation to God. God is not a citizen and can only symbolically inhabit a human throne. There is a kind of political equality in declaring that all, rather than just some, human beings are not moral persons. It is however a political equality of tenuous security. The offence of killing us is only dependant on God being offended by that killing. Large sections of the human population believe in a Bible that proclaims men who have sex with men, practitioners of witchcraft and children who disrespect their parents as right to be killed according to God. If we accept the paradigm of sin in which we are God’s property then any argument against such murder (even that it should be called murder) can only be an argument over whether that is actually what God wants. Which of us wants to go toe to toe with a fundamentalist to assert our humanity with no avenue to our inalienable personhood?<br />
<br />
God as the functionally only offended party to sin is not peripheral to Christianity. The complete forgiveness of sins by the cross depends upon it. We have seen two ways Gods' position can be understood that should disturb us. Neither honours the victim with their full self-worth. It is reasonable to wonder whether these understandings of sin and God contributed to the catastrophic failure in some church institutions of their responsibility to young people in their care. Did they simply forget the victim was an offended party? Did they seek forgiveness from the boss only? It is also pertinent to ask, as a society with largely Christian roots, whether these understandings have expressions in our broader politic. The violence of colonization is sometimes excused by the greater glory of the nation. The cruelty of offshore detention is unseen because its victims are nobody’s property. How do we all under represent the victim in our understanding of wrong doing?<br />
<br />
When we look at Christians practicing their faith we find many who recently exposed their churches corruption and have stood up for victims of abuse. We find a great number of the people who condemned and punished the violence of Australia’s colonization in our history were driven by their Christian faith. We find many Christians today at the forefront of trying to inject some compassion into Australia’s immigration debates. This leaves us with our last question, worthy of its own separate discussion; Are these Christians simply avoiding the logic of their own faith or do they have a different understanding of God as the only offended party of sin which doesn’t diminish the human victims? Is it possible that through an understanding of incarnation perhaps, these Christians avoid treating human people and God as separate persons who compete for our attention when addressing sin. Do they conceptually combine God and victim into one? I suspect this is so and I hope to find the opportunity to present this possibility to my Christian friends. I’ll tell you what they say. Hopefully they can give me the language to express their understanding to you.<br />
<br />
___________________________________________________________________________<br />
<br />
Psalm 51<br />
<br />
1 Have mercy on me, O God,<br />
according to your unfailing love;<br />
according to your great compassion<br />
blot out my transgressions.<br />
2 Wash away all my iniquity<br />
and cleanse me from my sin.<br />
3 For I know my transgressions,<br />
and my sin is always before me.<br />
<b>4 Against you, you only, have I sinned</b><br />
<b> and done what is evil in your sight;</b><br />
so you are right in your verdict<br />
and justified when you judge.<br />
5 Surely I was sinful at birth,<br />
sinful from the time my mother conceived me.<br />
6 Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb;<br />
you taught me wisdom in that secret place.<br />
7 Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean;<br />
wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.<br />
8 Let me hear joy and gladness;<br />
let the bones you have crushed rejoice.<br />
9 Hide your face from my sins<br />
and blot out all my iniquity.<br />
10 Create in me a pure heart, O God,<br />
and renew a steadfast spirit within me.<br />
11 Do not cast me from your presence<br />
or take your Holy Spirit from me.<br />
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation<br />
and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.<br />
13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways,<br />
so that sinners will turn back to you.<br />
14 Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God,<br />
you who are God my Savior,<br />
and my tongue will sing of your righteousness.<br />
15 Open my lips, Lord,<br />
and my mouth will declare your praise.<br />
16 You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;<br />
you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.<br />
17 My sacrifice, O God, is[b] a broken spirit;<br />
a broken and contrite heart<br />
you, God, will not despise.<br />
18 May it please you to prosper Zion,<br />
to build up the walls of Jerusalem.<br />
19 Then you will delight in the sacrifices of the righteous,<br />
in burnt offerings offered whole;<br />
then bulls will be offered on your altar.<br />
<br />Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-49550172307960799412017-12-09T18:20:00.003-08:002017-12-10T01:17:57.529-08:00Who voted no to marriage equality?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinFKskAAgLFApak9VDczRF63Effi-L_dm1hpwVpYBzmN5HFNJ-KJcxja6rH7-jtyle1hVGSmuWucdutEa3pWhsSceK2FC2PXi1SI0pT6-WFCL_F5qtDJ97oO-jFEeBy9RyrTlWzPiap9C3/s1600/novotenoface.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="352" data-original-width="638" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinFKskAAgLFApak9VDczRF63Effi-L_dm1hpwVpYBzmN5HFNJ-KJcxja6rH7-jtyle1hVGSmuWucdutEa3pWhsSceK2FC2PXi1SI0pT6-WFCL_F5qtDJ97oO-jFEeBy9RyrTlWzPiap9C3/s400/novotenoface.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
<br />
The Australian Federal parliament has removed the gender restrictions from the law regulating marriage, instantly recognizing the marriages of same sex couples married overseas and enabling others to marry here. This is something I am thrilled about and yet I find myself wanting to express sympathy for “no voters” (people who voted against marriage equality in the recent national postal survey). This isn’t my first attempt to do so. My piece titled <i><a href="http://humblewonderful.blogspot.com.au/2016/07/so-many-points-of-no-return.html">So many points of no return</a></i> tried to acknowledge the significant distress marriage equality would cause some no voters without conceding such distress is justified. My <a href="http://humblewonderful.blogspot.com.au/2017/09/is-view-that-homosexuality-is-sin.html">most recent post</a> tried to illustrate how even the view that nobody should have gay sex is not necessarily hateful, although I strongly disagree with this view. In this piece I want to specifically critique the othering of no voters. While still wishing they’d voted yes I don’t think of no voters as another type of person to me and my kind. This othering, when I witness it, indicates to me a deep mischaracterization of who no voters are. It’s also affecting how yes voters view themselves in a profoundly unhealthy way.<br />
<br />
38.4% of eligible voters who participated in the postal survey to permit same sex couples to marry, voted no. For some people this was astonishing and while a majority yes vote felt great they couldn’t understand how so many people could see same sex relationships as so inferior they wouldn’t allow them to get married. This however is the harshest possible way to understand no votes – as a condemnation of same sex love. If the vote had of been a simple “Should the law reflect the opinion that gay relationships are wrong” such a position would have had very little support. The official No vote campaign knew this and made sure the discussion was about anything else other than a direct condemnation of gay people.<br />
<br />
A more accurate understanding of no voters would acknowledge that some of those voters were simply cautious, inclined to vote no for any change. Such voters are why it is always difficult to pass any referendum in this country regardless of the opinion polls. The presence of such voters was supposed to be a real asset to the no campaign and was why people like Abbott pushed for a plebiscite. The more like a referendum the vote seemed, the more momentous the change appeared, and the more cautious voters who would vote no regardless of the issue. These are the voters who are swayed by the non-argument that we can’t know what will happen. The no campaign reminded these voters that heterosexual marriage has been around for eons, that it is a fundamental element of society and changing it… well…. I’ll leave that to your imagination. You can think of these voters as voters with generally pessimistic imaginations. I don’t share that pessimism in this regard but I do understand it. I myself like to be a second generation adopter of technology – to let the guinea pigs go first . I feel vindicated by every health and environmental scare caused by a product like Teflon or Polar fleece. Now that change has happened these cautious voters are increasingly going to exhale and accept the sky has not fallen. Most will wait and see but few will push for a reversal of marriage equality. Some will already be supporting it as the new status quo. Who can say what will happen if we change things back?<br />
<br />
An even stronger support for marriage equality would be found, now, amongst the no voters who were only against change to the marriage act because it was a bother. These are the people who have zero interest in gay rights either to oppose them or support them. Although we can suspect that Bob Katter harbours some homophobia, by his own words he is happy for gay love to bloom but has bigger fish, or crocodiles to be precise, to fry. Some people sharing this sentiment would have voted yes in the postal survey, just to get the bloody thing over with, but some would have voted no as a punishment for the time they feel has been wasted on the matter of same sex marriage already. We can expect that now the issue has been voted on publicly and in parliament such no voters would have no interest at all in revisiting it. They would punish any politician who re-opens the issue whether conservative or not. They are not a base a conservative movement can build on.<br />
<br />
A third group of no voters are those I call the “Because you asked” no voter. Many of these no voters wouldn’t normally make a big deal over homosexuality, in fact some might prefer never to mention it. Some would be happy to be friends with gay people, work for or with them and could support the claim that they “don’t have a problem with it” with multiple examples of not running around screaming “this one’s gay.” This group doesn’t think gay relationships are exactly equal to heterosexual ones. Some of them might think gay couples shouldn’t be raising kids but are otherwise equal. Some might have a lingering doubt that gayness is healthy and maybe they hope none of their kids turn out to be gay. Some might even have the view that homosexuality is like a mild mental illness, generally harmless but not to be encouraged, akin to a philia for vinyl records. I’m not trying to sugarcoat these views as decent ones. They are patronizing and ignorant and make life more of a drudge for all involved, especially queer kids. They warrant being labeled homophobic. But they don’t constitute the mentality of an army prepared to undo marriage equality or a group of people you could say “hate” gay people. Yes, if another public vote occurred they would probably vote no again but it would be “because you asked” and until such time the matter won’t be raised by them.<br />
<br />
If you are dismayed that a portion of people have this sort of soft distrust of gayness then I have to wonder what kind of a charmed life you have lived. Thirty years ago this attitude was the most many gay people felt they could hope for from their friends and families, let alone their churches. This was the world in which in 1984 Elton John got married to Renate Blauel. Remember that when Ellen Page, an actress whose fans are predominantly young and hip, came out as lesbian in 2014 there was still the fear she was trashing her career. The mood had changed though. The cognitive distance between the don’t ask, don’t tell philosophy of the 80’s and marriage equality is huge. What’s remarkable to me is how many people have crossed this distance over three decades. This group was never a bedrock of support for the no camp and I believe the no campaigns’ loss in the postal survey was largely due to crumbling historical support from this group. You could call that the Magda effect.<br />
<br />
Then there are the hard no’s. These people may punish their representative at the next election for voting for marriage equality. These voters are going to push for ways to constrain and contain this social change. As private citizens, they don’t recognize same-sex marriages, and many want to ensure as much as possible that they don’t have to when acting professionally either. Even this group can’t be considered to be an homogeneous group. Some of this group would be adamant that protections for gay people in employment or in receipt of services should be maintained – outside of wedding services. Some would be those who advocated for civil unions instead of marriage equality. They would include those who wanted to find any solution to the difficulties gay people face in being treated equally short of permitting them to marry. Under scrutiny almost all of this group are not inclined to see same sex attraction as healthy or “of god” in the same way as heterosexual relationships, but not all of this group should be tarred with the same brush as the next and final category of no voter.<br />
<br />
Lastly we come to the true haters. These include the ones whose self-hate has been cultivated in the dark of their own closet. They want others to know how disgusting they find gay sex is by describing all their extensive research into it, especially the bottoms. They think gay people are an invention of Communism through Hollywood and that you are the idiot for not seeing it. With a cavalier attitude to mixing historical analogies these people also refer to the Gay Gestapo and Rainbow Nazis as the vanguard of Cultural Marxism. Such people exist. They are real. They vote. They will be the continued core of an extreme-right conservative movement. But they are not 40% of the Australian population. I suspect they are less than 10%. Maybe less than 5%<br />
<br />
5% is still enough to win Senate seats after preferences. 5% hatred in a population is hardly something to stick on a tourism brochure. It’s just not a group the major parties can court openly. When we imagine that all the 38.4% who voted no belong to this group of haters we massively inflate the power of this group. We support the narrative that Cory Bernardi wants to sell – that there are a large number of disaffected conservatives who will rally to him to create a viable third force in Australian politics. We create for ourselves, as activists wanting to support a post-heteronormative world, an overwhelming enemy. We depress our confidence in our communities and for no good reason.<br />
<br />
The flip side of imagining all no voters as part of this hater group is that yes voters can see themselves as an equally homogenous but holy group. Yes voters can be broken up into as many categories as no voters. Some of them will be people who have worked for a long time to break down prejudice against same sex relationships. Some will have ticked this box as a continuation of standing up for their own relationships or the relationships of others close to them. But some yes voters will have barely thought about heterosexual privilege and their yes vote will be the first and last act they expect to make to dismantle it. Some yes voters will have voted so that they can stop hearing about homosexuality. For people confronting the condemnation of same sex attraction and those who experience it, it is a nice fantasy to imagine that 61.6% of Australian voters have our back. It’s not necessarily true. Reality is a lot more complex. In two years time people who voted either yes or no may even have changed their minds.<br />
<br />
Recognising this changeable and complex reality is especially important when understanding the way in which country of origin impacted on people’s votes in the postal survey. Individuals who having voted yes feel entitled to make sweeping generalizations about areas with high no votes are indulging a fantasy in which they get to be white knights rescuing queer people from their oppressors. Yet the only rescuing act that was made was a tick in a box and a walk to the post office. The thin veil of righteousness over racist and classist remarks is undeserved self-congratulation. Magda Szubanski by contrast has already indicated that after a long justified rest she wants to take the time to listen and build relationships with people in the communities which overwhelmingly voted no. Those who want to create change with her will likewise need to embrace a layered understanding of who voted no and yes for marriage equality.<br />
<br />
<br />Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-85828293883838911652017-09-01T21:40:00.000-07:002017-09-03T18:10:15.393-07:00Is it hateful to believe that having sex with someone of the same sex is always wrong?Consider the belief that people should <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOotsq4soug">only have sex if they are wearing a hat</a>. This belief holds that sex where any member is not wearing a hat is always morally wrong. Sex with a hat might be morally wrong in some other way but a hat on the head of all participants is an essential requirement of a sex act being morally ok.<br />
<br />
Now you might consider this belief silly. You might reject it out of hand as absurd. I contend that you cannot find this belief to be hateful. There isn’t any hate for any one behind it.<br />
<br />
You could claim that the application of this belief is likely to be unfair and even cruel. Poor people who are less likely to own hats are going to be more heavily restricted by this belief than rich people with a hat for every boudoir. People with some physical disabilities might curse this belief every time they struggle to put a hat on, if they even can. Other people will find following this rule a breeze. But this unfairness in application does not necessarily make the belief hateful. At most we could say this belief is not very “woke” to its justice implications but I would still argue it is not a hateful belief in itself.<br />
<br />
If this belief was widespread we would expect to see something; People with hate for others seizing on this belief to amplify and justify their hate. The desire to have sex regardless of a hat would be patholigised so that people with that desire could be seen as sick people, not to be trusted in many ways. People who have sex without hats ( a category that would earn both a medical name and a few derogatory slurs to call its own) would be denied jobs or the opportunity to formalize their relationships with the result that hatlessness in bed would be connected to criminality and promiscuity, justifying the discrimination. At the peak of this belief there would be a legal defence for murdering someone who wants to have sex without a hat and the police would barely bother to investigate the deaths of such people. Such people would be the butt of numerous jokes and stereotypical depictions. And far from the corridors of institutional power “Your mother doesn’t own a hat” would be a schoolyard taunt that always led to blows.<br />
<br />
The institutionalized hate around this belief would make it difficult to separate the belief itself from all the prejudices and priveleges of its proponents. Indeed there would be no easy agreement on what was the hate and what was just the belief. Is a program to remind people to wear hats in bed using shock treatment and prayer born of hateful discrimination or misguided love? Arguments would go on about how to understand these programs. Such confusion, however, does not mean the original belief itself is hateful. There are people full of hate who have found this belief useful to them (and we can reflect on whether that utility is in the nature of any legalistic moral claim) but there could be people who hold none of the hate who still hold the belief in its entirety. It is simply incorrect to call them hateful too.<br />
<br />
You’ve probably realized the metaphor I’m making by now. We live in a world in which some people believe that sex that isn’t between a man and a woman is always morally wrong. They believe there are many ways that sex between a man and a woman can also be morally wrong but the presence of the two genders is a necessary requirement for the sex act to ever be morally ok. This belief can be cruel in its application – people who don’t feel any homosexual desire follow it with ease unlike others who only feel homosexual desire. The belief certainly has been used by hateful people to justify their hate in all the ways I mentioned such views can. But I would still argue that the belief itself is not necessarily hateful.<br />
<br />
This is important to realize. We are in the middle of a national debate on the merits of opening our civil rite of marriage up to same sex couples. At the moment civil marriage in Australia requires the participants to be male and female. For some people to remove this requirement would be to “e<a href="http://www.simoncamilleri.com/why-i-will-vote-no-rev-neil-chambers/">ndorse sin</a>” at a national level and this forms the motivation of many no voters in the postal survey we may be having (the High Court challenge is yet to decide if it will proceed). I disagree with this view of sin. Its just silly to me to make heterosexuality a moral requirement of sex and a distraction from the real issues around love, mutual flourishing and consent. Still, I don’t think their idea that sex must be between a man and a woman is necessarily hateful and I wont join in labeling them as such.<br />
<br />
There’s more I could say on this but I need to finish up. I think we need to be able to hear other people say “homosexuality is always wrong” in the same way we might hear them say “masturbation is always wrong” or “sex before marriage is always wrong.” That is, to disagree but not necessarily be offended. There will be some who are aiming to be hurtful and spread hate. Most wont be aware of how unfair they are being although some may well be. But the ideas themselves can be held by people who are loving, as hard as that may be to understand.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-23427752569242023732017-07-03T19:10:00.002-07:002017-07-04T01:08:58.938-07:00Wonder Woman: A political, philosophical and theological review part 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt6hsD_o8xVC2qdTbh5ikEn-RgUtTycPK3GSQnpbGUjf8Eqhas8DicZmgwpghFsvZNoMZEbPZ_4XzXd5Krm2MV6W6HZSwEFKoWBaf3TvlmwDiFaZ3DARGle7jl0roPY04HP0-KtLoX-Xs2/s1600/wonderwoman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="640" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt6hsD_o8xVC2qdTbh5ikEn-RgUtTycPK3GSQnpbGUjf8Eqhas8DicZmgwpghFsvZNoMZEbPZ_4XzXd5Krm2MV6W6HZSwEFKoWBaf3TvlmwDiFaZ3DARGle7jl0roPY04HP0-KtLoX-Xs2/s400/wonderwoman.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
In Patty Jenkins’ 2017 blockbuster film, Wonder Woman is born with a specific holy purpose; she opposes the evil of Aries and restores humanity to their created nature. Throughout her story she brushes aside the suggestion that removing Aries won’t end all war, let alone the war around her. She is certain his destruction will instantaneously cause soldiers to drop their weapons as if stepping out of an enchantment. While there is an element of comedy to such an unsophisticated world view, Wonder Women’s is a naivety we can’t fully scoff at. After all, the truth she needs to learn instead, is deeply collectively embarrassing for us, as well as a truth that endangers hope. Her belief that Aries alone is why humans act with depravity towards each other not only lets us off the hook, it offers a simple path to victory. It is not too different to the naiveties we often embrace ourselves.<br />
<br />
The most obvious real world parallel to Wonder Woman’s perspective is a childlike view of the devil. According to some biblical interpretations the world is in the devil’s thrall, handed over by God to be their hunting ground as they “roam about like a hungry lion” (1 Peter 5:8). Only those who are strong in their Lord Jesus, who trumps the devil, can protect themselves from the devil’s possession. This is a fantasy that all the world faces one opponent in disguise. Worse still, this can be read in reverse to declare any opposition to either faith or just familial authority, as coming from this evil one. This simplistic idea of human evil is what we read about it in some terrible tale of a family exorcism that kills a child or in the experienced of other victims of religious abuse declared by their families as taken in by the devil. Sophisticated clever people, religious as well, scoff at the ignorance of such a totalising world view in a way that the Wonder Woman movie could be seen as encouraging.<br />
<br />
But politics, secular politics too, is full of equally simple naiveties. The lure of simple singular enemies is strong. One such foe, patriarchy, is touched upon in the Wonder Woman narrative. If only women ran the world, maybe life could be as idyllic as a Mediterranean paradise. For some feminists of the time and setting of the film, the hoped for effect of women voting was an end to war. For some later feminists the Age of Aries with its male symbolism is supposed to be replaced by the Age of Aquarius and an ascendancy of “feminine values”. Demonstrably the inclusion of women in politics can and does improve the world, increasing the political viability of peace, the valuing of the environment and the funding of education especially for girls. Society after society has shown this. Defenders of patriarchy are peddling a disproven medicine. But there is also a naïve overreach in the hope that only patriarchy needs to be overcome for utopia to emerge.<br />
<br />
The optimism that an all-women’s collective will have no toxic politics, or that lesbian relationships will be free of domestic violence, or that a female politician will be incorrigible, is an attractive fantasy. It gives us a simple path forward to a peaceful and just world. I remember hearing when young the speculation that generations from now we could become a humanity of one sex, reproducing asexually through technology and subsequently no longer containing our ancient code for violence in male DNA. But such utopian speculation sets us up for disappointment similar to the disappointment felt by Wonder Woman when human peace was unlinked to Aries’ death. Women betray women, just as men betray men. Gender, with respect to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monique_Wittig">Monique Wittig</a>, is primarily a set of relations between two classes and in the absence of sex to mark gender lines, new lines are created to create new classes. The partial truth at least of this can be confirmed by anyone who attended a single sex school. Biological sex is not necessary to divide the school into valued/unvalued, privileged/oppressed, key/peripheral, “male”/”female”. A single sex world is likely to simply gender itself anyway.<br />
<br />
For my part I like to blame capitalism. I want to locate all our horrible dealings with each other as outworking of this system that commodifies everything from knowledge to fun and ultimately turns people themselves into mere capital. Racism, sexism, the destruction of the environment can all be seen as bolstered by capitalism. But just like patriarchy, capitalism is only a form evil takes. The Jonestown practice of apostolic socialism had terrible problems but none of them can be fairly attributed to capitalism. The mass murder of Jonestown members including many children is often mistakenly referred to as a suicide although it is uncertain how many chose in any way to drink poison. Certainly no infant chose anything and we know others felt they had no choice. Multiple other disappointments with the utopia of post-capitalism exist as well. Certainly figures like Stalin and institutions like the KGB show us that great cruelty can thrive in societies that reject capitalism.<br />
<br />
Whenever we move beyond our initial naivety we are left with two choices. We are right to feel a sense of betrayal and even heartbreak. A promise of an easy victory has been broken. The Catholic Church represents such a broken promise for many who grew up there and were told that the faith was a refuge for children. So too does the Queer community for anyone who has been screwed over there despite the profession of family, while left wing activism has its own internal conflicts despite the songs of solidarity. Religions and political affiliations which cast our problems as having a singular identity inevitably come to wear the villain’s hat as well. Why not condemn everything as pointless and equally bad?<br />
<br />
This option is put to Wonder Woman in the film. After moving beyond the first naivety that human society would become perfect without Aries, a second naivety is proposed by Aries - that all humanity is to be condemned and the best we can hope for is its destruction. The first movement is a movement beyond simple faith but a second movement has to be made to go beyond disillusionment with everything. It can be a return to a different simplicity. We can lurch from one solution to another as if now we know what fixes humanity but I consider this a disgenuine denial of reality. I don’t think Wonder Woman ends up in that place.<br />
<br />
Wonder Woman knows that any blow she strikes will never be decisive. We who have made a similar journey out of simple faith know that any change we make to society will never be entirely enough. We know there isn’t any absolute refuge from evil. Church communities, activist communities, alternative economic systems, retreats to family or tradition, will never be perfect and will always have the potential to be abused and to let us down. If faith is faith in something as a perfect solution, then we have entered an acceptance of no-faith and yet we do not give up on humanity. <br />
<br />
Society is not utterly depraved and in the struggle to do the right thing improvements are made. Even if no improvements occur this is not necessarily what engages us. Humanity, with its moments of kindness and passion, its concern and its actions of self-sacrifice, captures Diana’s imagination as it should capture our own. If those moments are fleeting and constantly swallowed up by greater evil it simply becomes even more necessary that we become involved in order to sustain them that bit longer. This is the sort of faith that embraces its own folly, which acknowledges it can’t win in any final way. Diana, as Wonder Woman, ends the film still a hero in our own time, 100 years later, presumably having seen both World War Two and the Cold War follow Aries’ demise.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3iEA9Hg6Vy5EaiZN8Wsb7h3Cfhm-VuuzZzyIWCtY9LSLFcByNK4ENVTej864tHT3jdTj59Ii6oevILSU8Crw6fFOdKkd8tP5Z4WQN_t2uiLFl8aECrrZp97lDF3-37jb6_F0wZEIMitjb/s1600/wonder-woman-dr-maru-1002607-320x180.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="180" data-original-width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3iEA9Hg6Vy5EaiZN8Wsb7h3Cfhm-VuuzZzyIWCtY9LSLFcByNK4ENVTej864tHT3jdTj59Ii6oevILSU8Crw6fFOdKkd8tP5Z4WQN_t2uiLFl8aECrrZp97lDF3-37jb6_F0wZEIMitjb/s1600/wonder-woman-dr-maru-1002607-320x180.png" /></a></div>
I want to particularly mention the scene where Wonder woman forgives the poisoner, Dr. Maru, rather than destroy her. This could be construed as Wonder Woman putting her faith in love or forgiveness in a way that was completely in-congruent with all the killing she did to get to that point. I agree this would be in-congruent but I don’t think Wonder Woman does make this act of faith, at least not in the sense that a pacifist does. This is one moment where the idea of no-faith or faith that acknowledges its folly is necessary to understand her actions. Wonder Woman, post her movement beyond naivety, engages in violence with no faith that this violence will be conclusive and in mercy also with no faith that this act concludes anything. In this sense she has moved beyond her destiny as god-killer, or the identity Aries offers her as God, and stands alongside the rest of humanity.Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-14642971834836870922017-06-12T21:41:00.000-07:002017-06-13T02:53:28.980-07:00Wonder Woman: A political, philosophical and theological review Part 1.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnzXFdXWJR6ZsuKbL5FoyNk4TArJQnOhO8qv2T_Khz8ombx7PAmRO-wr_Au6rOUxNZ-_qhP2-k_x6QRwNGkzu5LlKwawEWTdwHoaXKSoN1zn11waO1xCVQzGa8PCFyDmipPNcihCS9RVUJ/s1600/wonder-woman-hed-2017.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="660" data-original-width="1320" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnzXFdXWJR6ZsuKbL5FoyNk4TArJQnOhO8qv2T_Khz8ombx7PAmRO-wr_Au6rOUxNZ-_qhP2-k_x6QRwNGkzu5LlKwawEWTdwHoaXKSoN1zn11waO1xCVQzGa8PCFyDmipPNcihCS9RVUJ/s400/wonder-woman-hed-2017.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
This post contains spoilers for the 2017 Wonder Woman movie. Loving the craft of movies as I do, I don’t want to spoil a good one and Wonder Woman, without needing to call it a classic of cinema, is a good one. Come back after you’ve watched the movie. Even if you have to wait for the DVD this will still be here.<br />
<br />
This isn’t intended to be a general review of Wonder Woman. I’m only going to focus on what I see as the substantial political, philosophical and theological content of the film. In one quick aside though, Wonder Woman deserves to be complimented on the contrasting use of colour between Diana’s bright birthplace and “the world of Men”. I wish we’d lingered in the sunlight for longer – the tendency of modern films to shoot so much in shadow annoys me – but I get the point they were trying to make. The world of WW1, and Industrialisation as grey, muddy and smogfilled makes sense. That was just one of many clever film making choices of this movie.<br />
<br />
The gender politics deserve special mention. Even if this wasn’t the first blockbuster superhero film directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins, and the first mainstream success of the sub-genre with a female lead (The 1984 Supergirl movie by comparison returned <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088206/business?ref_=tt_dt_bus">less than half its production budget</a> in ticket sales), the setting of the film with its Amazonian idyllism in contrast with WW1 before women got the vote in England, put gender front and centre in the film. For me two points stood out. The male allies of Wonder Woman stand as testaments to the brokenness of the world she has entered. Their depictions are sympathetic and complex. Many male lead action movies have treated their female side characters as having far less depth. As a male I particularly liked viewing men in a softening role, helping the action hero to not lose themselves in god-like power by reminding them of their humanity, ironically in Wonder Woman’s case. I might grow tired of seeing my gender cast that way a hundred times over in some alternative reality but as a change it was more than refreshing. In fact, it felt healing. There has been a lot of ink over how empowering it is to see a strong female on screen but seeing softness in male characters, in the action genre, was an equally rare delight.<br />
<br />
Secondly I do not think it is too great a stretch to suggest that the films treatment of sex and sexuality owes a lot to the considered gender politics of the film. Wonder Woman was originally written by a man with a penchant for female sexual dominance. Her original character was strong and fierce but also for her time very sexual, often either tying others up or being tied up herself while, again for her time, scantily clad. Much has also been said about the inadequacies of women’s attire in both superhero and fantasy genres and Wonder Woman’s corsetry and hot pants never bucked that trend. With this back story and context and in today’s time when sexualized violence against women in shows like Game of Thrones is a proven seller Patty Jenkins could have chosen to have capitulated to such trends. Catwoman with Halle Berry did just this by practically reducing that character to a walking butt shot and it was punished commercially for its lack of depth. Alternatively Wonder Woman could have skirted any controversy by avoiding all hint of sexuality in the film, and making no overt reference to either the politics of modesty or overt sexuality, as the Wonder Woman tv show and orginal comics did. Patty Jenkins chose neither.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBrkWg7UHrudjZWYi2d9xU3tr_vp4EX2Rg_KFqhmoD4fHlBoB_MOOWKg_ys1SOBmFWZDKgQHhtpxD7mpXMxSdLUKf7F0vQbKKpdcb0GIEYM7VVgh6N-e-6lggN19ITdOmMoqcrb9MhgddW/s1600/Spartan_hoplite-1_from_Vinkhuijzen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="By The collection assembled by H. J. Vinkhuijzen (1843-1910). See: [2] - New York Public Library (NYPL) digital gallery: [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2904013" border="0" data-original-height="610" data-original-width="306" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBrkWg7UHrudjZWYi2d9xU3tr_vp4EX2Rg_KFqhmoD4fHlBoB_MOOWKg_ys1SOBmFWZDKgQHhtpxD7mpXMxSdLUKf7F0vQbKKpdcb0GIEYM7VVgh6N-e-6lggN19ITdOmMoqcrb9MhgddW/s320/Spartan_hoplite-1_from_Vinkhuijzen.jpg" title="" width="160" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWwRT9xVD-T_mHX1r5rPQIGlTXKDocyH6lCWbfSb8H2N3osXGKWrKbSQjw98AbwbruzEjZWAXwncJ1GQix4TKzlXuGhzThw6Fk38j6o-x8D4sJjLlJR5aTlU5_jwMsIZmkQcxxOZHWsSQW/s1600/zena2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="747" data-original-width="602" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWwRT9xVD-T_mHX1r5rPQIGlTXKDocyH6lCWbfSb8H2N3osXGKWrKbSQjw98AbwbruzEjZWAXwncJ1GQix4TKzlXuGhzThw6Fk38j6o-x8D4sJjLlJR5aTlU5_jwMsIZmkQcxxOZHWsSQW/s200/zena2.jpg" width="160" /></a>The films cleverness lies in tackling the issue of sexualized female heroines head on. The immodesty by early 20th century standards of her costume is treated as a comment on the prudishness of such a society and its effect on woman’s capacity to move is exposed. When Wonder Woman attempts to kick while wearing one dress there are unhelpful gasps at the revelation of her bloomers and the womanly attire she is given to wear is ultimately deemed inadequate for fighting. Mary Wollstonecraft in her vindication of the Rights of Woman would agree. This point is aided by the fact that Wonder Woman's armour has a practicality to it. Crucially her guts are protected, exactly what armour in Ancient Greece was designed for and like Wonder Woman, the Ancient Greeks did not generally use leg or arm protection. The bare midriff that Zena the warrior princess sometimes wore is nowhere, thankfully, to be seen.<br />
<br />
Perhaps best of all in terms of gender politics is how clearly the film depicts Diana’s agency regarding sexuality in a way that also includes the audiences relationship with her character. When Diana sleeps with Steve Trevor the initiative is hers and Steve is clearly shown to consent but then that is the extent to which our voyeurism is permitted. This is not sex for us the audience in the way that HBO practically guarantees a woman will be stripped to the waist in every episode but sex as part of Wonder Womans control over herself. I’m not saying that nudity is in any way always negative in story telling. Nudity can be funny. Nudity can be powerful. Nudity can be incidental or tragic. Nudity however can also titillate. Titilation, also not necessarily a bad thing, shapes audience relationships with characters so that they are there for us, not merely in the context of the story, but in a seperate context of our own sexuality. I was thrilled with a directorial decision that meant Wonder Woman was a sexual being without our relationship to her as viewers being sexualized in any way. Thankfully the particular combination of titilation along with violence against women was a mistake the film never came close to. Too often directors emphasis the vileness of a villain by showing them molesting a women, especially a heroine, in a way that is not accidentally erotic for audiences and which affects our relationship as fans to that character.<br />
<br />
In a few brush strokes the film even holds up to the viewer the divisions of race and class between the gender of men. The deep respect of the Native American character in the film, nicknamed Chief, played by <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/wonder-woman-eugene-brave-rock-1.4148722">the actor Eugene Brave Rock</a>, when Wonder Woman speaks to him in his native Blackfoot language is palpable. The poignancy when Chief points out that his land was taken by the people of Steve Trevor is real. This character and this interplay could have been dropped from the film without changing the story much. I am so glad it wasn’t however. Besides being a rare respectful portrayal of first nations people in US cinema, it adds a richness to the location of the story in time and an understanding of feminist and patriarchal history that goes beyond the cartoon idea of bad men. Race and class in contemporary politics confound simple caricatures of women=victims/saviours, men = powerful/oppressors. This film, with its basis in comics, could have stayed with such a cartoon analysis, for cheap effect, but didn’t. By going beyond, it gave Wonder Woman that feminism that goes hand in hand with tackling all injustices, in which women’s equality is a necessary part but not the end of making the world a better place.<br />
<br />
My comments so far were originally only intended to be introductory for another discussion. The way this film deals with human evil and with the concept of judgment has a lot to teach us. Instead I found I had more than just a few things I wanted to say about Wonder Woman’s treatment of gender. Consequently I’m going to leave those thoughts about evil for a second post. As always I would love to hear your comments on what I’ve said so far. Do you disagree? Were there other elements of the films gender politics you consider worth mentioning? Would you rate the film less favourably? Feel free to comment below.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-84395650824962581632017-05-08T05:30:00.000-07:002017-05-08T05:30:23.810-07:00We need fair micro-credit solutions.I have friends who, when bad luck strikes, have been forced to take out credit card loans. Every single article I have read or consumer advice show I have watched has warned me this is a terrible idea. Those friends however are disinclined to accept any direct financial assistance from my partner and I instead. I get that there are solid cultural reasons for this. I believe we can overcome, or maybe circumvent such reasons, with positive micro-credit systems.<br />
<br />
We view direct transfers of money between friends as problematic. If your mate helps you out with a lift you might give them money “for petrol” as a way of diminishing the act of payment. If they help you fix your door (which friends have done for us) then you’ll often have a better chance of paying them with food or alcohol than you will putting money in their hand. The exchange of money can transform a relationship into employer/employee or service provider to customer. Those relationships can overlap with friendships but they also come with their own kinds of expectations. We are friends with our mechanic. But when he operates as our mechanic we expect a certain standard of service and he expects prompt payment. <br />
<br />
The problem is sometimes we need money. In such situations we are culturally predisposed not to solve our problems in our communities with our closest allies. Instead we go to banks and when we lack the collateral to secure a bank loan we take out credit card loans, hoping we can pay them back before the above 20% interest rate kicks in. And we pay high fees for the privilege. When for some people repayments become difficult the crippling debt and fees serve to dig an impossibly deep hole, for others credit cards just add to the cost of living – not killing them but making life significantly harder.<br />
<br />
The alternatives to credit card companies are worse. So called payday loans which provide instant short term loans of amounts like $6000 without credit checks, are loan sharks with fancy marketing. People end up with real interest rates as high as 68%, face late fees for not meeting repayments and end up facing constant harassment from debt collectors. Here are some resources that make for harrowing reading:<br />
<a href="http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/whats-up-with-payday-loans/7794806">http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/whats-up-with-payday-loans/7794806</a><br />
<a href="https://peterpilt.org/2014/03/03/exposing-nimbledumb-little-loans-deceptive-little-company/">https://peterpilt.org/2014/03/03/exposing-nimbledumb-little-loans-deceptive-little-company/</a><br />
<a href="https://peterpilt.org/2016/01/12/financial-rape-of-australians-by-wallet-wizard-cash-converters-and-loan-ranger-peter-pilts-thoughts/">https://peterpilt.org/2016/01/12/financial-rape-of-australians-by-wallet-wizard-cash-converters-and-loan-ranger-peter-pilts-thoughts/</a><br />
<br />
The ultimate lender of last resort is the pawn shop. Cash converters is the most famous. They are an unwitting but not unwilling fence of stolen goods half the time. Even when they pawn legitimately owned property that business model is based on undervaluing goods to those who bring them in. I remember seeing an elderly man being told how worthless his wedding ring was by some young punk in a Cash Converters Polo-shirt while I waited to check if they had any of my stolen property. That’s the ugly face of capitalism they keep out of the brochure. In addition Cash converters joins in the payday business with a lack of scruples that makes the other players in that industry look good. In 2015 they were reached a settlement to <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-18/cash-converters-reach-settlement-partial-refund-loans/6556018">refund about 37.500 customers</a> after charging them real interest rates as high as 633%!<br />
<br />
If you are wondering if there is a solution you’ll be pleased to know that there sort of is. All the small dodgy lenders we’ve mentioned (like Nimble and the rest) can be considered micro-credit or micro-finance agencies. They are ways to provide small amounts of credit – anywhere between less than a 100 dollars to a few thousand. NILS, the <a href="http://nils.com.au/">No Interest Loan Scheme</a>, administered by Good shepherd, is showing how micro-financing doesn’t have to be exploitative and can serve as a crucial step in staving off deeper poverty. For want of a grand for example a person may not be able to repair their car and thus can’t make it to work.<br />
<br />
The NILS program is restrictive. The loans can’t be used for ongoing costs like rent or bills. This is so as not to put a loan in the hand of someone who might be able to obtain emergency rental assistance or defer their bill payment – better options really than a loan. It also ensures the loans aren’t simply bandaiding a problem that will re-present in a month. The size of the loans are also very small between $300 and $1200. That no doubt ensures the program helps the most people but there would be many people who need more than that. For example, purchasing a roadworthy car for less than $4000 is nigh impossible.<br />
<br />
Participants also need to be on low incomes and healthcare cards. This ensures the program meets the deepest need however even people off health care cards can face the need for credit with a real uncertainty about when or if those circumstances will turn around. <a href="https://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/enablers/income-test-low-income-health-care-card">The Health care card cut off</a> is reached with an income of about $500 per week with an allowance of $34 dollars per dependant child. Two bedroom dwellings in Bendigo ( a regional Victorian town) are at their cheapest at $220 per week, while in Fawkner (a once outer suburb of Melbourne and traditionally very working class) they sit above $300 (which is still more than $100 cheaper than a basic single person apartment in Carlton). (<a href="https://www.realestateview.com.au/">https://www.realestateview.com.au</a>) It is easy to see how a family might be on an income above the Health care card cut off and still be in financial stress after rent.<br />
<br />
We should also consider that it doesn’t make economic sense for people to focus on mere survival. Living beyond our immediate means can be good economics. A person might reasonably build or purchase their own home, or undertake study or obtain a bee hive and a couple of chooks, or get that sore back properly looked at or buy a push bike. These are all investments in a more sustainable personal economic future which lines of no interest credit would make a lot easier. The NILS program of the Good Shepherd might service only some of these occasions. Its not meant to replace exploitative micro-credit agencies all together. For that we may need to consider other options.<br />
<br />
Crowdfunding can be a way forward. <a href="https://www.canstar.com.au/p2p-lending/who-offers-peer-to-peer-lending-in-australia/">Peer to peer lending</a> is specifically a type of crowd funding which aims to emulate the banking system with lower overheads. The outcome is both lower interest rates for lenders and higher returns for investors. In addition peer to peer lending can give investors more control over how their money is loaned out. One positive aspects of peer to peer lending is how it draws loans from a very broad range of investors thus reducing the impact of a single loan default on any one person. The platforms also provide anonymity to lenders and borrowers overcoming our cultural problem with money and friends. Peer to peer lending however is profit driven perhaps precisely because of that anonymity enabling us to make a profit off simply loaning money to someone. I hope peer to peer lending does bite into the major banks business but I also don’t expect it to fundamentally challenge the banking business model so much as run it more efficiently.<br />
<br />
The other extreme are crowdfunding sites through which people give money away like <a href="https://au.gofundme.com/">GoFundme</a> and to a lesser extent <a href="https://pozible.com/">Pozible</a> (which has some rewards for givers). Theses sites don’t fully escape our cultural taboos about asking friends for money. There are people who, in financial stress, still wouldn’t use such a means of asking. On the flipside because the money isn’t officially loaned people may put a higher standard on why they would give it. Perhaps a car that needs repairing wont be enough to garner support.<br />
<br />
I did say Pozible and GoFundme don’t officially loan money but they can still be understood as forms of credit. If I fund you when you need money and when your situation recovers you fund someone else and so on, including the possibility that I will one day be funded myself, then the gifted money acts just like a no-interest micro- credit scenario would. Money moves around to meet need and keep people away from loansharks.<br />
<br />
There are other ways donations can form a kind of bank. <a href="http://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/story/2968702/free-wheels-open-doors-for-families/">Free Wheeling Fun</a> in Bendigo takes in old bikes, fixes them up and then provides them for a donation to anyone who needs a bike, This concept of free-cycling minimizes expenses and waste at the same time. Baby gear; prams, cots, high chairs, clothes and toys , even non-disposable nappies; all are perfect for free cycling. They just take up space once outgrown but they will be a real boon to someone else. What makes this sort of giving away into a form of micro-credit is the reciprocation. Upon giving away a cot, get a kids bike for a donation, then give that back because your kid is grown and ask a stuff-sharing community for a cot because its second child time. Or something like that. What doesn’t make this like a bank is that giving or taking is not tracked. While this means people may exploit the situation I suspect that doesn’t happen as often as feared. Rather I worry that people would be concerned about looking like they were exploiting the system and despite the opportunities in free-cycling will only turn to it after exhausting less savory options.<br />
<br />
The enemy of positive, generous and non-restrictive micro-credit alternatives is a cultural view that we all must stand on our own. Nobody does stand on their own of course. We are supported by family and friends if we are fortunate. Less positively we are a part of histories of oppression and theft in Australia. For good or ill, any employment we have is embedded in a whole society that makes that employment possible. In so many ways the cliché call to stand on our own (in addition to conjuring an image unfair to people without use of their legs) is never accurate. If we can accept that, we can instead invest in fairer ways to help each other. Anything has to be better than interest rates that contribute to our growing income inequality.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-61282451805107515032017-04-05T19:20:00.001-07:002017-04-06T15:18:28.155-07:00A Theological Response to Child Abuse in the Church.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRUfPzP21ie3B9buc0RrHxU6MfisyWSgHPZu_c-ekowlwVn3Di0Io-yi64b-ivsjuKn6Rud34d9N6qzrH4n8K2ilGkZZI5CsF79uydDdkCPTuryMs0Me3ekG9p66jzxDjxULKTKCbqIgww/s1600/jesus-loves-his-church.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Jesus loves his church." border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRUfPzP21ie3B9buc0RrHxU6MfisyWSgHPZu_c-ekowlwVn3Di0Io-yi64b-ivsjuKn6Rud34d9N6qzrH4n8K2ilGkZZI5CsF79uydDdkCPTuryMs0Me3ekG9p66jzxDjxULKTKCbqIgww/s320/jesus-loves-his-church.jpg" title="" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are many articles about the institutionalized abuse of
children in the Catholic church. The scale of the problem in <st1:country-region w:st="on">Australia</st1:country-region> alone
has been phenomenal. At least 1,880 offenders. Over 4,440 victims. And this
is only the Catholic church.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www-archive.biblesociety.org.au/news/whose-fault-is-child-abuse-a-catholic-theologian-responds-to-the-royal-commission">One article in particular</a> struck me as a telling example of the churches response from a mainstream (perhaps a little to the conservative side) Christian site.
In it a Catholic theologian outlined a practical response, a procedural
response to the issue of child abuse. I actually recommend the content of that article for what it was trying to be. The
article, by a theologian, also illustrated to me the absence of a specifically theological
response from the church to this issue. <br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Theology is the discussion and study of the divine. It is
the considering and contesting of all that can be said about God, or even whether
anything can be said at all. The epidemic of child abuse in the church is
shaping how God is understood and affecting what statements about God are
believable. There is a lay theological response to this issue even if it seems
like church theologians are largely focused on the pragmatic. I want to try and
articulate how I see that theological response developing in this article.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
It is important to distinguish a theological response from
one which looks for blame or solutions. There are many different contributing
factors to blame for child abuse in the churches. These may include theological
factors – that is people’s understanding of God may have enabled and even justified
the abuse, but other factors include institutional self-preservation as well as
explanations that are better rooted in patriarchy and a broader social
devaluing of children. The purpose of a theological response is not to push
theological faults forward as if they alone explain what has happened but to
look for how to positively understand the divine in the mess of this matter. The
end result of a theological response is a set of statements about the divine
that can co-exist with the abuse that has transpired.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
The first reflection that must be made is of God’s weakness. I say that to
deliberately confront a particular notion of God represented by the statement, “God
will not be mocked.” This notion of God is represented by the stern disciplinarian
who stands above us with strap in hand, swift punishment befalling those who
disregard their authority. Whether or not the divine cares if it is mocked, it
has had no recourse when it is so thoroughly debased and disgraced as to be used
to cover child abuse. I am not blaming the divine. I am postulating that it has been grossly misrepresented, but I am noting it could not prevent
that misrepresentation.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To an extent this is simply the classic “problem of evil”
that is used to disprove a God who is all loving, all powerful and all knowing.
Child abuse is a clear evil and a God
who has all three of those characteristics is not consistent with a world in
which child abuse occurs. There are answers to this problem – the importance to
God of free will being one of them – but those answers don’t really do much other
than insert a “because” in the statements at least in terms of the God we
experience. God must allow evil to occur and thus cannot be experienced as all
powerful over the world <i>because</i> of
the importance to God of free will. <br />
<br />
The problem of child abuse in the church, however, is not simply a crisis of
God’s power over the world. It is specifically a crisis of God’s power over
their representation. The result of this crisis, regardless of the “becauses”
that we insert, is that God cannot be experienced as in control of their
representation. This means that whatever logical solution we come to that
preserves Gods existence in the presence of evil, the connection between God
and their representation in the world must cease to be a special relationship
different to their connection to the world at large. <br />
<br />
This is huge for some churches. For other churches, not especially. The Quakers
have a strong distrust of people speaking for God in any way and believe in our
capacity to experience God directly through silence and stillness. At the other
extreme the Catholic church holds that it is specially instituted to represent
God on earth through the authority of the Pope and their Bishops. The idea of a
God who has the power to do that simply does not survive the child abuse
scandals of the church. God can grant no special protection from corruption or
falsehood to any institution standing in their name.<br />
<br />
This is not just a problem for Catholics. Generally Christian denominations
have relied on two sources of authority to support their doctrines. The
traditions of the church and scripture. These two strands are not
distinct. The specific texts which were included as scripture in Christianity
were chosen by a series of early councils of the church which relied on
tradition to determine inclusion. Tradition is also why these decisions are
seen as enduring. Meanwhile the Catholic church, which could be said to have emphasized
tradition over scripture, bases its authority to do so on a passage in
scripture. Importantly both tradition and scripture rely on some notion that
God has some capacity to bless their correct representation in the world. Christian
scripture is not the writings of an incarnated God but writings about that
experience by others and is deemed to be specially protected from falsehood by
God. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This reliance on protected representation only becomes
stronger as we head back into Christianities past and the books of their Old Testament.
There are Christian schools of thought which contend that meaningful theology must
be restricted to uncovering the truths revealed in either these books or the
New Testament writings. This is to say that Biblical representations of God are all that
can be trusted and evidence from beyond them is unsafe to depend on. This is
how deeply held the notion of a special relationship between God and their
representation by the church (in the broader sense of the word) is for some
forms of Christianity. Such ways of theologizing cannot survive the child abuse
scandal rocking the churches.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I should note that there is strong evidence, at least in the
Catholic church, that the proportion of offenders in positions of authority
exceeds that of the general community. However, this isn’t necessary to justify the
claims I am making. Nor is it necessary to prove this isn’t simply
because more trust over vulnerable people was historically placed in the
churches hands or due to a hands-off approach to the church by secular
authorities that would have failed any organisation. Regardless of cause the evidence that there is no
special difference favouring those purporting to represent God over secular
organisations is enough to disprove a special relationship between God and
their representation in terms of power over evil.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If no special relationship exists between God and their church then this is not all negative. Freeing the divine from
possession by its spokespeople (spokesmen mostly) emboldens other theological claims.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses into Child Abuse that is
exposing the abuse in the churches is the work of the non-churched, the
religious and the ex-churched. If the divine is free from a special connection with the
church we can see the divine in this work. The work of the commission can be viewed as divinely inspired even as it exposes and potentially weakens the church.<br />
<br />
Much of Judaeo-Christian theology has God massively concerned with their
representation. They are, in story, outraged by heresy and idolatry both of which
get God wrong. If God is incapable of protecting themselves from
misrepresentation this idea of what angers God seems foolish. It would be a
futile anger. We might be better off considering the divine as a spirit
radically unconcerned with their representation, happy to work through atheists
or Catholics in order to get the job done as in the work of the Royal Commission. This picture of God seems more consistent with a world in which we are saddened and inspired by different aspects of human society with no pattern as to whether they can be associated with one religion or another or none.<br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--></div>
There are many more diverse theological responses to this
issue than I have covered here. There are victims who simply put to one side
questions of God’s power and find a place for God as a companion in their
suffering. There are others who dismiss entirely the usefulness of the idea of
any divine spirit. These both seem like legitimate responses to me. The picture of God that is no longer viable is the God who can guarantee to be known through their
representatives, by ensuring that the lies that happen outside the church are kept from happening within.Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-41119980039296709582016-11-08T14:58:00.001-08:002016-11-08T17:44:26.588-08:00Marriage - Something old, Something new. <div class="MsoNormal">
I’m currently reading “Love Wins”. Not the much hyped Rob
Bell book about the non-existence of hell but a book by Debbie Cenziper and Jim Obergefell with the same title, about
the court battle to establish marriage equality in the <st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S. I</st1:country-region>t’s a
fascinating story so far with clear prose back grounding the plaintiffs and
lawyers pivotal to the case. The differences evident in the book between the <st1:country-region w:st="on">U.S.</st1:country-region> situation and <st1:country-region w:st="on">Australia</st1:country-region>’s has led me to undertake
some historical speculation. We are currently at an impasse in the progress
towards marriage law reform in this country. Could we have taken a different
path?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
In 2011 Julia Gillard as Prime Minister of a minority government, opposed
same-sex marriage. As parliamentary leader of the Labor party she negotiated
that a conscience vote on the issue of marriage reform was Labor’s policy
rather than a binding vote in support. At the time this was seen by some as
protecting Labor backing amongst religious conservatives. Catholics are a
significant Labor constituency with historically socially conservative views.
Those views are changing however with opposition to homosexuality now largely
living in more Liberal voting evangelical churches. This was one reason why the
politics of Gillard’s decision led to many scratched heads. Was it really
necessary? <br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Even more confusing was that Prime Minister Gillard herself
was an open atheist in a defacto relationship with no (public at least)
intention of marrying. Why was she personally aligned with the “marriage
defenders” on this issue? Gillard didn’t just broker a deal on the conference
floor she spoke openly about not wanting to change the marriage act to include
same-sex relationships. For atheists who take a strong pro-secular position the
chance to remove John Howards judeo-christian inspired stipulations about
gender seemed like a no-brainer. If it wasn’t politic to do so, this could be
understood, but to go on the record as not wanting to change such a blatant
elevation of religious concerns? As an atheist? Bizarre.<br />
<br />
Gillard however gave us her preferred solution. Straight couples and same-sex
couples alike should embrace civil unions. Leave marriage to the churched. I
imagine that Gillard might have also felt that she represented the ultimate
victory in regard to marriage – a person holding the highest office in the land
without needing a ring on their finger to prove their substance, a woman in
public office who didn’t need to express pining for her day in white taffeta.
From this perspective making marriage relevant again by broadening it to
same-sex couples looks like a gross step backwards. <br />
<br />
I’ve been wondering, what would it have taken for Gillard to have been right?
For our circumstance then to have been the Lefts cultural victory in this matter, sans
any change to the Marriage Act would have needed Australians to embrace a
perspective that wasn’t popular even then. Marriage equality has gained momentum since
that time and is now the only solution for the cause of same-sex relationship recognition in the popular
imagination. It would have taken a very
different <st1:country-region w:st="on">Australia</st1:country-region>
to have ended this conversation with Gillard’s solution in 2011.<br />
<br />
Crucially, we would have needed there to be a stark split between those who marry and
people in the LGBTI communities and their allies. If those groups were separate
then the rhetoric of “leave marriage to them” would make sense in the LGBTI
community. “Them”, the marrying-kind, as distinct from those in same sex
couples or their allies, would be a sensible category. For some people this is
their reality. The adult children of people who never married, whose parents
have no expectation their kids will marry can feel marriage belongs to “them”. Such
people may see marriage as irrelevant to their life – not only are they
unlikely to get married, but they are unlikely to even get invited to a
wedding. Occasionally someone in their circle of friends or family surprisingly
falls in love with one of the marrying kind and a wedding invitation appears in
the mail. Attending the wedding is like
attending a bar mitzvah when one is not Jewish. The food is great, the music as
well, but nothing makes perfect sense. You just roll with it as a curious
exotic adventure.<br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--></div>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Likewise the other side of the divide, the marrying
kind, would need to be profoundly separate from members of the LGBTI community
and their allies for Gillard’s position to be comprehensible for them. Again
this is some defenders of traditional marriage’s reality, betrayed when they
use slogans like “choose your own word, leave marriage alone.” For these people
same-sex couples are not a part of the tradition and history of marriage. They
are like goyim at a bar mitzvah who liking the look of the thing decide to have
their own. The belief is that same-sex couples have no historical claim to this
ritual.<br />
<br />
Although some people live lives as described above with few connections to
their opposite, my own society is not like this at all. I have one sibling who
is married, one engaged, one who probably never will get formally married, and
my self who married only after having my children. In our extended family there
are atheists, Catholics, Anglicans, Evangelicals and a bunch who are open to a
range of religious positions. Friends and family include same-sex couples. Marriage
is our word, our cultural heritage, although none of us are treating it exactly
like our parents and some of us are either rejecting or radically reinventing
it. It seems perfectly plain to me that same-sex
couples who want to get married, and whose families and friends want to celebrate
their weddings, do so because this is a part of their traditions and cultural
heritage. It is what their parents did and what their siblings have done. It is their word too.<br />
<br />
There is something gloriously socialist about the construct of the civil union.
Or perhaps a better description of its tone would be the perfect rationalism of
the French republic with its proposed ten hour days and ten day weeks. By
sweeping away the traditions of the past and replacing it with something that
lacks such baggage we can provide a purely functional answer to state
relationship recognition. Marriage can continue in churches, including gay
affirming churches too, or synagogues or mosques or wherever really but as a separate
institution, left on the law books as an anachronism. Or in true French
revolutionary style we can even expunge marriage from the law books altogether
and make it a private arrangement. <br />
<br />
Bluntly this isn’t how the world works. The French Republican Calendar was
abolished after twelve years. Esperanto, developed in 1887, to replace European
languages with a logical grammar, hasn’t caught on. Legacy systems pervade our culture: you might argue because of a failing
of vision and ambition. However partly at least we want those legacy systems to
remain as a connection to the past and our shared heritage. Far more
than Gillard realized and far more than those who want same-sex couples to
leave marriage alone we all have a shared heritage that includes marriage. What
we are trying to do is to share it better. </span>Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4894764035439419656.post-38560108754605708652016-07-05T21:06:00.001-07:002016-07-06T20:51:10.572-07:00So many points of no return.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_k68AriWOqs6BRhBy0WFq5mkDTzD1KmkBKYTcxdHJhM1HN3Iy3lD-P45zx3no3l_tFIGR6IAutrHO0umYoguS1nMmuzp6JOJhBYy97yVuREeO4hUwLnKwhnIDwlAzY-4xuRdModRImDzD/s1600/cliff+edge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_k68AriWOqs6BRhBy0WFq5mkDTzD1KmkBKYTcxdHJhM1HN3Iy3lD-P45zx3no3l_tFIGR6IAutrHO0umYoguS1nMmuzp6JOJhBYy97yVuREeO4hUwLnKwhnIDwlAzY-4xuRdModRImDzD/s320/cliff+edge.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Just before Australians cast their votes in our most indecisive election ever , the leader of the Liberal party and incumbent Prime minister gave an <a href="http://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/media/address-to-the-national-press-club">address to the National Press Club</a>. The answers he gave to some questions touched on a theme of interest to me. It’s the theme that everything hangs in the balance or that we are at a point of no return.<br />
<br />
A question from Catherine McGrath from SBS television about engagement with multi-ethnic Australia prompted a response that oddly was able to include this sentiment;<br />
<br />
<i>“Right across our nation, the choice on Saturday is clear - my team, a stable Coalition majority Government, with a clear national economic plan that will enable Australians in all of their diversity to realise their dreams.</i><br />
<i>On the other hand, the chaos, the uncertainty, the debt, the deficit, the higher taxes slowing investment, deterring employment, depriving Australians of those opportunities – that is the choice. It’s a clear one.”</i><br />
<br />
A question from Catalina Florez for Network Ten about the Prime Ministers security in his own leadership was deflected with this idea;<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>“Catalina a win for the Coalition on Saturday is critically important for the future of 24 million Australians. It’s critically important for their children and their grandchildren. It’s critically important for the generations that are yet unborn.”</i><br />
<br />
This could be considered standard political rhetoric. An incumbent government will always want to hype the risk of change, especially when it has only been in power for one term. Suggesting that voting for the other team will bring descending chaos is par for the course.<br />
<br />
It is not surprising then to find similar sentiments from the main opposition party, or from minor parties. The issue might be the health system, public television, the environment or some vaguely racist Australian way of life but the tone is the same; everything hangs in the balance, this is the point of no return. Vote for me or we're doomed!<br />
<br />
I am not writing this blog to scoff at this rhetoric. There are ways in which I consider the stakes high enough and the choices stark enough to make exactly such statements justified. The Great barrier reef is in very dire straits, possibly past the point of no return. The removal of protections for Aboriginal sacred sites in Western Australia will commit damage that cannot ever be undone. If we sign the TPP we will have shackled ourselves legally to support more rights for corporations than governments and cannot simply walk away. A line was crossed when we gave our immigration minister the capacity to remove people’s citizenship. We need a commissioner to investigate the abuse on Nauru before the perpetrators crawl under some rock and evidence is destroyed.<br />
<br />
I believe everything I’ve stated in the above paragraph so I am not trying to mock claims that we face critical junctions. In fact I often suspect we are wired to dismiss catastrophic language out of hand. I think we might very well carry a sense of our own absolute importance and believe that this protects us, individually, nationally and globally from anything too bad. I remember a story of a musician who fell out of a second story window one day and only just survived. It was the moment when they realize they were not guaranteed a starring role in life; they could just be the guy who dies in the first act. Most of us don’t have that realization. Religiously there seems to be a similar sort of denial that climate change is really real, as if God would never let it happen to us. Nationally we want to believe that a mining boom was evidence of our hard work or national destiny, not a lucky streak we have ridden while our manufacturing has dried up and blown away. I don't think we are too special to be doomed.<br />
<br />
What I do want to do is ask, “What are the implications of a genuine belief that we might pass a point of no return on a matter of deep importance?” In life we must often cope with holding a sincere high stakes view of a particular choice and the awareness that we don't control how that choice will be resolved. This might be because we accept that we share that choice with so many others in a democracy. It might be because we see the world around us as largely idiots led by liars. Either way we know we might lose in a contest of ideas even when everything hangs in the balance.<br />
<br />
One solution is to make personal choices and support causes that match our values, separate to the political process. During the election campaign our family came close to hosting a survivor of Nauru currently on a bridging visa who was stuck without housing in Bendigo. Bridging visa’s preclude housing services from being able to offer much assistance and a robbery had left him without means. He left Bendigo for work on the Murray instead which reflected his discomfort with taking charity (and probably not our messy house). Our name is now linked with Rural Australians for Refugees, as a potential site of accommodation. I’m not saying this to brag (we didn’t actually do anything) but because this, plus weekly tutoring we do for a family of Karen refugees, is how my family copes with having little political control over the high stakes matter of Australia’s refugee policy. Other people make the choice to foster, donate to services for the homeless, establish farmers markets, or fund-raise for solar panels on schools. Taking these actions can help us cope with fast approaching dooms we can't convince our leaders to care about.<br />
<br />
Sometimes we refuse to tolerate our slide towards disaster. I can think of many times when I have admired direct action to oppose injustice despite the democratic will of the majority. My hear swelled with genuine adoration of the people who <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/passengers-removed-from-qantas-flight-following-asylum-seeker-protest-20150202-133o65.html">refused to allow a Quantas flight to take a refugee back to persecution in 2015</a>. There is obviously a danger of elitism to this. How do I know that I am right to stand against the will of the majority. As any student of history shows however majorities don't just get it wrong as often as individuals they get it even wronger in more spectacular fashion. My last post which mentions the Heroic Imagination Project raised the very point that obedience to social norms is evils best friend.<br />
<br />
What consideration should we show other people’s dread that something is a matter of extra-ordinarily high stakes and beyond their control. If we share their understanding of the issue we can lock arms around shoulders and cry together. But what if I don't agree with the weight they give the matter? I know people who felt the inability of midwives to obtain insurance for homebirths was tantamount to disaster. It just didn't rate like that for me but do I owe them any allowance for the grief and outrage that I understand in principle? And what if we are opposed to their view; do we owe them any graciousness even as we work for the very outcome they perceive as catastrophic? What graciousness could be meaningful short of a concession to their strong feeling?<br />
<br />
This last question bears relevance to the matter of same-sex marriage for me. I support the removal of gender from the marriage act of Australia. I have increasingly been seeing it as a matter of less importance though. This is because as more and more other nations endorse same sex marriage we are increasingly culturally accepting the institution in advance of any legal change. A same-sex couple can say they are married in Australia and the response in many public spaces is that this is a "real" marriage. This response emboldens other declarations and before you know it gay couples are as likely to want you to look at their wedding photos as straight ones.<br />
<br />
This current situation in which culture leads the law (rather than the opposite) actually appeals to the anarchist in me. There is something empowering about recognizing marriages in spite of the state's position although to be fair we have relied on other nations laws to get us there. Still I sometimes wish we who have argued for legislative change never gave such importance to government opinion in the first place. Rather than feeling that a same-sex marriage which lacks government imprimatur is not a real marriage I feel like it is more real – more purely a statement by two people, fists raised together against the world. I’m a romantic in this way.<br />
<br />
There are however people both supportive and opposed to same sex marriage who feel that marriage law reform is the paramount political issue of our time. There was <a href="http://yourcan.org/index.php/committee-statements/20-a-statement-by-the-gaa-church-and-nation-committee">an unfortunate statement put out by the Presbyterian church of Australia</a> in the lead up to this election. It described passing marriage law reform as to “embed motherlessness and fatherlessness in public policy.” The sole mention of any other concerns was to rank them as less than marriage law reform.:<br />
<i>“The Presbyterian Church understands that the moral matrices by which each of us evaluates political parties are often wider than one issue and weighted differently. They include concerns about social justice, equity, and morality when weighing the common good. However, redefining marriage is a once in a lifetime issue, and it is our belief it should be weighed accordingly, and considered carefully.”</i><br />
<br />
This was a relatively calmly toned piece. We can find hotter heads on either side of this issue if we try. The point is that in this statement the Moderator General of the Presbyterian Church of Australia spoke for many who feel that same-sex marriage constitutes a watershed moment for their politic. Assuming that eventually we will get there and same-sex marriage will be passed is not ridiculous. It regularly receives above 60% support in reliable polls. Do we who support marriage reform have any obligation to sympathy to those who oppose same sex marriage and fear that it will take us to a place of catastrophe?<br />
<br />
The simplest answer is no. A sense of impending doom can’t be allowed to create obligations on those who don’t share that sense. Otherwise we create the incentive to manufacture such a sense of doom. Anyone who parents knows this. And if you don’t then I would like to tell you how critically I feel I need some chocolate. Very critically.<br />
<br />
This answer however is insensitive to the way in which friendships and family connections reach across political divides. I have people close to me who do think that same-sex marriage is a mistake of epic political importance. As, culturally, same-sex marriage recognition is already here, due to international influences, and is likely to be introduced legally to Australia soon, its worth reflecting on how I would like those friends and family members to act towards me if they were winning this debate. How would I feel about their triumphalism if the poll numbers were reversed? I probably wouldn’t want to hear it.<br />
<br />
One thing that can be done is to listen to specific fears and see if they can be mitigated. Some people think that the only time you should take your adult pants off with another adult person is if the two of you are married and whats under those pants is wildly different. Specifically they think there should be a penis and a vagina. Some of those people, but not all, also think you should only put those bits together to make babies and not do anything which makes babies unlikely. There are ways that these ideas are defended that breach standards of polite conversation - calling women who live differently sluts for example or describing gay couples as narcissistic (you know because a man loving a man is like a man loving himself). But even there do we really want to use the law to make such speech illegal? I don't and would like to nut out some agreement about the reasonable freedom to articulate a variety of views about sexual morality. This includes some appreciation that what is ok in church is not necessarily ok in the workplace and what is forbidden in the workplace needn't be forbidden in church. People shouldn't fear that marriage law reform will lead to gulags for traditionalist Christians and that means challenging any rhetoric against their views that justifies that fear.<br />
<br />
There are areas of potentially unsolvable conflict. I am not comfortable with descriptions of homosexuality as a disorder or mental illness or as sinful. I don't think any of those descriptions constitute hate speech but I don't think they constitute "health speech" either or "holy speech" if you like. I want to argue against these descriptions but I don't want to have those arguments in federal parliament. School policies, government tenders to service providers, the regulations of professions like social work and psychology are areas where the line between local argument and state control have always been murky. I am not sure how to resolve lines between free speech and therapeutic or justice priorities in these areas. I think we can avoid confusing these battlegrounds with marriage reform but I concede people who think homosexual activity is sinful are scared they wont be able to keep saying so and maintain public employment. I'm willing to investigate that fear and we should all interrogate our motives to see if that is actually our intent.<br />
<br />
There will be celebration when marriage law reform finally happens. There should be. Marriage requires an element of public celebration after all. However I will try to be mindful that there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth as well and that this feeling is no less sincere than the feeling I have about the death of the Great Barrier Reef. Although can I just say, the Great Barrier Reef is dying within two centuries of white invasion after thriving under thousands of years of responsible care by several different Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander nations.... if we could at least not trumpet the supremacy of Judeo-Christian Australia so much it'd be great!<b> </b>Bloody hell.<br />
<br />
Politics takes us past many points of no return. Life does too. We cope in different ways. Even if our fears of descending chaos are not founded it can be difficult to know that at the time. I think if we are to maintain the bonds of family and friendship across disagreements about matters of high stakes then we need to have some consideration of each others angsts. In terms of our own fears hopefully we have shoulders not only to cry on but that join in making our hand cart as just and fair as it can be on its descent to hell.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Tonyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07412650446530771853noreply@blogger.com0