Not long after 9/11, I was talking to an elderly Dominican priest. I was startled to discover that he thought the felling of the towers was an inside job by the CIA, of some such US authority. The evidence for this was all over the web. Adherents to this particular theory are known as truthers, as in “the truth about 9/11,” much as believers in the theory that Barak Obama was not born in Hawaii, but in Kenya, are called birthers. Each of these theories is supported by a slew of websites and internet forums constantly presenting and re-presenting the evidence for their contention, although truthers have the more vigorous and voluminous support. In fact, 9/11 conspiracies have the largest following since the various theories about the assassination of JFK seized the public imagination, and the term “grassy knoll” came to have a specific meaning in the vernacular of the US. There’s never been any shortage of theories on a bewildering range of topics, from the trivial to the socially disruptive. With minimal effort, I can find a mass of evidence that Neil Armstrong did not land on the moon, but was in a TV studio in Houston, or that the Shoah was invented after the war. Continue reading “Belief, Knowledge, Faith”
Socrates’ Daemon
If you start to read Xenephon’s The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates on your Kindle, or Kindle reader on PC or Mac, you will encounter in Book 1, Chapter 1, the following passage: Continue reading “Socrates’ Daemon”
Miracle or Magic? A homework exercise
What’s the difference between miracle and magic? Let’s first define them. The Macquarie Dictionary defines miracle as an effect in the physical world which surpasses all known human or natural powers and is therefore ascribed to supernatural agency. Magic is defined as the art of producing effects claimed to be beyond the natural human power and arrived at by means of supernatural agencies or through command of occult forces in nature. Occult is variously defined as 1. beyond the bounds of ordinary knowledge; mysterious. 2. not disclosed; secret; communicated only to the initiated. 3. (in early science) a. not apparent on mere inspection but discoverable by experimentation. b. of a nature not understood, as physical qualities. c. dealing with such qualities; experimental: occult science. 4. of the nature of, or relating to, certain reputed sciences, as magic, astrology, etc., involving the alleged knowledge or employment of secret or mysterious agencies.
Close Encounters
Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released in 1977, and was a blockbuster success for Steven Spielberg. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of the plot.
A team of investigators find, intact in the Gobi Desert, a flight of Navy planes which disappeared in the 1940’s, and interview a witness to the re-appearance of the planes. This team will re-surface throughout the film, making similar startling discoveries, and conducting similar interviews. They provide an underpinning of respectable reality for the events we are about to witness.
Blame Hume: About a Sermon
“As Charles Sanders Peirce notes (Peirce 1958: 293), the Humean in-principle argument has left an indelible impression on modern biblical scholarship. Humean considerations are expressly invoked in the work of the great German critic David Friedrich Strauss (1879: 199–200), transformed into one of the “presuppositions of critical history” in the work of the philosopher F. H. Bradley (1874/1935), rechristened as the “principle of analogy” in the writings of the theologian Ernst Troeltsch (1913), and endorsed, explicitly or implicitly, in many contemporary studies of the historical Jesus (Dawes 2001: 97–106) and the New Testament (Ehrman 2003: 228–30). Commitment to something like Hume’s position lies on one side of a deep conceptual fault line that runs through the discipline of biblical studies.”
Thinking with a lisp
I talk to myself. Or, I talk to others when alone. At times, the dialogue, or at least my part in it, is audible, and at others quite an interior event. The embarrassment of being caught in this most inappropriate behaviour will generally suppress it, but a period of isolation can bring it to the surface again. Continue reading “Thinking with a lisp”
Anxiety burnout
Looking at the posting dates, I see that it has been nearly 6 months since the last. I descended into a pit of work-related anxiety, and now — well, it’s not that I have overcome the anxiety; more that I am getting sick of it, and need to do something else.
I’ve been out of my depth at work since I started, but in volunteering to write a particular document, I bit the bullet of learning enough about the things we do to be able to explain it to other who were starting from the same position as me. And a serious case of lead poisoning I developed. Continue reading “Anxiety burnout”
Cathedral, after midnight
Let’s go back a decade, more or less. Find, in memory, some Friday night. After midnight, the Victory gradually quietens down. The groups of drunken kids wandering from pub to club along Charlotte Street, begin thin out. Wander up the ramp from the footpath into the grounds of St Stephen’s, past the lovely old two-storey house, past Bishop Quinn’s statue, to stand at the curved glass wall of the sacrament chapel. The water flowing along the inside of the wall from the baptismal fount might be matched by a semi-circle of water outside. Or, depending on how late in these years you choose to visit, there might be a dry bed of pebbles, as there is today. Continue reading “Cathedral, after midnight”
Winter…
Winter is coming. The sky this morning is a perfectly clear blue. A light breeze carries the chill, and a high pressure system sits over most of the continent. Across from the station where I wait, fuming slowly at the mess that’s been made of the timetables, one of the yellow-orange crane booms over the tennis centre building site is swinging around against the blue. Soon I’ll have to start wearing a jumper.
A Beenleigh train has just pulled up behind me, cutting off the sunlight except for the back of my head. It’s gone now, but the breeze has gusted, so I momentarily feel colder in the sunlight. The secret of Brisbane winters, when the drying westerlies blow cold, sweeping all cloud from the sky, is to stand in the morning sun in the lee of the wind, and bask in the warmth. But not today. This day is warming as the sun rises.
A speaker announces that the 7:12 service to the city is running approximately ten minutes late. Previous train 6:50. Next train 7:25. Not bad. I see a flash of red underwing and look for lorrikeets, but in a moment I realise that these are galahs. The birds are on the move. An unusual drone has me looking up from under my hat. Three Cessnas are flying in formation, quite high, towards Archerfield. I’ll wait for the 7:25. Winter’s coming.
Sunday School
It was, mostly, in the hall of the Presbyterian church at the end of our block, diagonally across from the headmaster’s house on the corner of the primary school. There, while the parents, notably excepting ours, or, I should say, excepting our mother, worshipped, the children were instructed in the basic tenets of the faith and in the virtues, until the day they could join the adult congregation, to be exposed to the more risqué passages of the Bible and dark talk of temptations and sin which would run off the steep flanks of their incomprehension, along the erratic, parabolic gradient from innocence to experience that ran through the listeners, to collect on the eroded terrain of others’ experience in pools of remorse and baptismal grace. I say our mother, because it was as though our father spoke a foreign language with no correlates to “church” or “religion” and could not comprehend this Sunday morning activity, and so ignored it. At our mother’s insistence we went, and grumbled at going. There was, despite this, much that I enjoyed about it. There was much that, to my later surprise, I remembered. Continue reading “Sunday School”