A nice definition of futility would be tonight in Coles when my “trainee” checkout dude used a plastic bag as a temporary store for my groceries before placing them back in my reusable green bag - and then disposed of the plastic bag.
If there’s one thing that annoys me about the Emerging Church movement out of the States, it’s how many preachers and writers and bloggers crap on about U2. Now I like late-80s-early-90s U2 quite a bit, but I’ve got to say their later output isn’t really up to that standard. I suspect it’s simply that U2 are famous, so you know people will get your references, and because Bono is a Christian who says critical things about the church and goes on about poverty. I’m not sure that’s enough to deserve all the praise.
There are a few other candidates for minor EC sainthood but each has problems - Sufjan Stevens is a bit too off-beat and still not that well known, Kanye has a tendency to say ludicrous things that piss everyone off. So U2 it remains.
Andy and I have decided enough is enough. As leading lights of the EC in Australia (cough), we’ve decided that Nick Cave will be our preferred musical poster boy. He’s a local, he’s become a Christian while still singing songs that scare small children and their parents, and he’s completely impossible to get a proper handle on. What more could we ask for? So Saint Nick it is.
Oops - that’s already taken, isn’t it?
In a month plagued by panic
Attacks the like I rarely see
I’ve found a strange comfort
In free verse
Last night I watched Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion documentary and I guess it was what you’d expect. Dawkins writes well (his evolution books are good reads) and his public presentation is also impressive. He has such a reasonable, likeable demeanour and his documentary is so well constructed, it must be easy to miss what a load of bullshit it mostly is.
The substance of his argument is as follows: religion makes you not think for yourself, not thinking for yourself means blindly following authority, blindly following authority leads to suicide bombings.
A small problem with this is that - especially for a humanist - Dawkins has surprisingly little faith in humanity, or at least the segment that follow religion. It’s as if he believes the moment that someone believes, they actually switch off all critical faculties. He’s never experienced religious faith, so he doesn’t understand it. And he is more than willing to attribute all the bad in human nature to religion and retain all the good for rational belief. As if every religious believer is one sermon away from jihad and every free-thinker is protected from evil acts by their superior critical faculties.
He’s quite disingenuous too: the way he interviews a fundamentalist Muslim, who converted from Judaism, and acts surprised that he doesn’t understand Dawkins’ viewpoint is barely believable. His interview with the poor, oppressed atheists of Colorado really had me reaching for the tissues - the way they “furtively” met out on the balcony of someone’s house sure brought home the point.
And his arguments are often fluffy as hell. One scene shows a Catholic procession and he says something like “It looks pretty harmless, but isn’t it just the start of a slippery slope to strapping on a backpack full of explosives?” Ah yes, the old “slippery slope” - a scientifically credible argument verified by rigorous experimental data!
It made me imagine a YouTube response, in which the narrator shows a science lab, with nice women and men in white coats. “It all looks pretty harmless,” he says, “but isn’t this just the start of a slippery slope to destroying millions of innocent lives in a Fascist eugenics experiment?”
I’m not sure how Dawkins’ plans to rid the world of religion. The widespread teaching of evolution and enlightenment philosophy doesn’t seem to have killed it. Banning it hasn’t worked in the countries where it’s been tried. The problem is that it’s perpetuated by everyday people, rather than simply institutions - and short of Maoist-style “re-education” of all religious elements, I’m not sure how you’d do it. Dawkins would have to recoil at the idea of a new Inquisition, to weed out “un-scientific” thinkers.
Wouldn’t he?
Harnessing the power of the atom and modern science, the society of 2008 is a world away from that of today. Picture Mr Jones putting on his handy jet-pack as he hovers his way into the office! Imagine Mrs Jones at home with her labour-saving devices and robot child-minding assistant! Think about a world where you need never walk again for all the moving footpaths!
OK, so maybe things didn’t turn out the way people expected, but this article from 1968 actually got quite a few things right - mainly the use of computers and modern communications.
The most amazing prediction would have to be where the writer predicts that Axl Rose still won’t have finished Chinese Democracy.
I occasionally buy books on the assumption that I’ll read them “some day”, but then begin to have doubts when I can’t get past the first page. Just recently, though, I’ve knocked off a couple of the Himalayan mountains in my collection - including the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Sure, there are still six more to go, but the feeling of having finished a 500 page novel that has stared accusingly at me from my shelves since the middle of 2002 is a good one. I’m not boasting, I’m just sayin’…
The thing about Lost Time is that it was the topic of a Monty Python sketch that I remember from my childhood, even if I can’t possibly have “got” it at the time. The idea is that a sea-side bathing beauty competition is reconfigured as contest to summarise the 2000-ish page work in 15 seconds. The usual Python funny business ensues.
I guess the first volume could be described as “Boy goes for walks in the country with his family and wishes his mum would give him a kiss. He falls in love with a little girl whose dad fell in love with a woman who wasn’t his type but who reminded him of a woman in a painting. She cheated on him and made him a jealous wreck. The end.”
But that hardly does justice to why you’d actually read the thing.
It was Andy who pointed out a while back the trend for Christian radio to shift away from overtly religious programming to a general “light and positive” format. I avoid both Christian and “light and positive” radio like the Plague, so I was unaware of this change. Today it was brought home to me.
My cab driver was playing “Light FM”, which offers, apparently, a “positive alternative”. Positive apparently equates to ads for Hillsong events and playing the Newsboys and Wet Wet Wet back-to-back. And I guess because they can’t be mindlessly smutty like most FM hosts, they have to be mindlessly…well, mindless. A ten minute discussion on the relative virtues of paper or cardboard burger packaging? This is meant to be funny?
The irony of it all was that my taxi driver was from the Taxi Driver school of shouting and horn-beeping. And complaining about other drivers. And swerving to avoid hitting the car he was tailgating.
I’ll take the “negative alternative”, please.
I don’t think I ever thought my life would be like this, but it is.
I grew up in small towns, mostly. So when people I knew went to work, they got in a car, drove for a little bit and got to their workplace. Nowadays it seems like me and a bunch of other people are forever hopping in and out of planes and dividing their working lives between cities hundred of kilometres apart.
Take one friend of mine, whose wife got posted to the country. Now he spends a couple of days a fortnight in Sydney, another couple in Brisbane and at least a day’s worth in Regional Express terminals, sitting on those little plastic chairs.
Or my other friend who is fly-in-fly-out in the mines of the Northern Territory. Seven days at the mine, five at home in Canberra and another two days in aeroplanes and departure lounges.
Or the old uni friend who is in town this week from Melbourne for five days of training. And she’ll be back regularly, because her company’s management is all here. A few weeks ago, she’d never even been to Sydney.
I’m going to be doing a fair bit of travel myself, although it seems like it will be at manageable levels. My boss is based in another city and half my job is meeting with organisations that are evenly distributed across most of the capitals.
This blog will have to be re-titled “How I Stopped Worrying And Learnt To Love Qantas”.
