Category Archives: religion

24th August now and then

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When you have so many years stored in blogs!

West Wollongong this morning

Rather odd post 24th August ten years ago

Two kinds of people on earth to-day…

Posted on  by Neil

Last night I made an amazing discovery, an aspect of myself of which I had hitherto been unaware. Or perhaps now I am a septuagenarian it has developed as part of the general unravelling one has to expect. To adapt the words of the Bard of Wisconsin:

THERE are two kinds of people on earth to-day
Just two kinds of people, no more, I say.

Not the humble and proud, for in life’s little span,
Who puts on vain airs, is not counted a man.

Not the happy and sad, for the swift flying years
Bring each man his laughter and each man his tears.

No; the two kinds of people on earth I mean,
Are those whose pee stinks, and those whose is clean.

Last night, you see, I had a pasta dish from Woolworths that contained quite a bit of asparagus, a vegetable I rarely eat because as a child I found the following version slimy and repulsive:

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I am sure that is a really excellent product, by the way. I speak only of my taste as a child. I didn’t like pumpkin much either, but I do now. And the Woolies pasta dish was not too bad either.

However, on peeing later on – more than once being a septuagenarian – I encountered The Phenomenon. There was more than a whiff of sulphur in the air, reminiscent of but not quite as strong as the hydrogen sulphide or rotten egg gas that we no doubt have all experienced at some time. And it was definitely coming from my pee!

Is this some dreadful disease, I wondered briefly, until thinking ASPARAGUS! And maybe shiraz as well…

No less an institution than the Smithsonian confirmed my suspicions. And so did the ABC’s Dr Karl.

We humans have been eating asparagus for thousands of years. Indeed, asparagus is shown on a 5000-year-old Egyptian stone carving.

The ancient Romans and Greeks prized asparagus. And it was easy to find. Some 300 different species grow naturally between Siberia and Southern Africa….

On 24th August 2009 I visited Sydney Boys High

I was struck by the view across Moore Park which I had surveyed so many times over the years.

And how about 2005?

Yes, I was still part of the staff then…

7.30 Report: The Mine and the Islamists

22 Aug

Well, that is quite a story on tonight’s 7.30 Report about The Mine and the weird Islamic fundamentalists. It is worth revisiting my diary for July 28 2005, July 27 2005 and July 26 2005. There were many earliier entries on Diary-X referring to the Islamic Student Forum in 2003, but they sadly have gone. There have been two forums since, but I did not attend them. My friend the Mufti of Watson’s Bay was one of the speakers at the first and second ones, and in fact told the students in no uncertain terms before the second one to make sure no “total crap” was handed out. The bulk of the sessions was reasonable, or where fundie/conservative (not the Mufti, that’s for sure!) it was sadly like Christian and Jewish glazed-eye literalists, the usual “I have a hotline to God” routine, you know: “The Book says, and it’s true because the Book says it’s true and when the Book says it is true it is true because the Book says it’s true because it is a True Book etc — in eternal circularity…” Mister Tariq, the principal fundie at the seminar, seemed to take everything literally and regarded Abraham, for example, as his best mate and as real and as knowable as John Howard. He also had this line where covering your wife (as in hijab) was cool because she was a precious possession, and just as you’d cover your Porsche if you had one… (Mind you, head scarves don’t offend me in the least if that’s what the wearers want to do; they even look rather nice quite often.)

All of which is sad, and the Khilafah mob are crazy as cut snakes in many respects. The argument on The 7.30 Report last night went thus:

JONATHAN HARLEY: The group may be small in Australia, but Hizb ut-Tahrir spans the globe. It’s strongest in Central Asian republics where it’s being fiercely repressed by authoritarian regimes threatened by its radical ideology. The party is banned too in a number of Arab countries. In Russia and Germany it’s listed as a terrorism group and in Denmark a Hizb ut-Tahrir spokesman has been convicted of submitting anti-Semitic propaganda, the substance of which an Australian spokesman has refused to renounce.

LIEUTENANT COLONEL CRISPIN BLACK, TERRORISM INTELLIGENCE ANALYST: A lot of people call it a conveyor belt towards terrorism, others have called it a precursor organisation towards terrorism.

We now know Khilafah and Hizb ut-Tahrir are one and the same, which is very recent knowledge for those of us on the outside of the Muslim community. In 2003 on Diary-X I wrote:

Khilafah: extreme but not necessarily terrorist

In a wholesale rejection of what we in the West might call the postmodern condition, in a yearning for a pure and noble state rooted in the dream of the past, in rejecting the undeniable humiliation of Muslims over the past few centuries and the depradations of the capitalist and imperialist world, very many seem now to be turning to a movement that I can only see as ultimately disastrous. It should definitely be added that not all people who adhere even to these views are terrorists or condone random violence, but there can be no doubt that it is such an ideology that drives those Islamists who are terrorists, just as anarchism and communism inspired terrorism in the past.

Is Khilafah the communism of the 21st century?

We should recall that just as in McCarthyist times thoughtful people who criticised US policy, or who questioned this or that about capitalism, were labelled as “Commies”, “dupes”, or “fellow-travellers”, often without justification, so too today any Muslim or Muslim group who questions the assumptions and policies of the US government is likely to be labelled “a conveyor belt to terrorism”. We do need to be careful. Was David Lange “a conveyor belt to terrorism”?

Let’s hope the HSC English course subverts my young friends thoroughly with its emphasis on what a text is, multiplicity of readings, nature of “representation” and importance of context, and that they proceed not to insulate their Holy Book from the rules of textuality.

I was glad to see, when I dropped into the Islamic Students’ meeting last Thursday, that they were mucking around with a tennis ball when they were meant to be praying…

They are really nice kids in fact; what they do in the school is done under exactly the same rules that apply to the Christian group and the Jewish group.

Entry revised 23 August. 

Weather delays Woolies, and I fall for a meme…

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West Wollongong is not so bad, but….

…bad enough to cause this to happen. I had put my order in on Wednesday to be delivered this morning ahead of the King’s Birthday long weekend, especially given the weather was inclement enough to encourage me not to go to town today…

So I rang the number and the gentleman I eventually spoke to (possibly in Bangalore judging from his accent) was able to reschedule for the same time tomorrow morning,… I have plenty of supplies in the meantime. The call including wait time took ten minutes. Happy with the result.

The dreaded memes of social media

Yes they can be a convenient and easy way to get your opinion out there, but they are also propaganda heaven! I must remind myself of what around 1959 the Presbyterian Minister at Sutherland, Cam Williamson, would often say:

A text without a context is a pretext!

Take this one, as I did a few days ago, because I was outraged by it — as no doubt its creator intended.

And it is total nonsense! On Facebook I said: “Yes, she was a fascinating person, but this is the road not to hope but to horror. No nation on earth is beyond accountability. None. And relying on a promise to a figure who most likely never actually existed is not a good line to take…. I refer to the gent from Ur of the Chaldees about whom there are all those great stories I am VERY familiar with, and indeed I have also read the versions told in Islamic tradition of Ibrahim — the very same person though their version is much much later. They are great stories and they do have a kernel of truth, reflecting movements of actual people long before the Hebrews or Arabs ever existed as distinct peoples…”

I had some favourable comments on that, until Grant Hansen wrote: “Did Gm really say this? Rather disappointing if so.” So I started checking, as I should have done before, and found she did say that — but about whom and in what context? Elementary questions so easily forgotten. And this is what I found.

As quoted in Le Monde (15 October 1971) apparently. But I find she was referring not to Israel but to the USA! On the other hand she did say “There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” As quoted in Sunday Times (15 June 1969), also in The Washington Post (16 June 1969) — Wikiquote

Mind you that second one is bloody horrible too, and the first applied to the USA is perhaps even more nonsensical. There we find that sub-Christian illusion that haunts the USA even as I write this, where people fail to remember that the Founding Fathers were pretty much a pack of Deists rather than fundamentalist Christians.

“Christian Nationalism” is a perversion of both wholesome Christianity and healthy patriotism. It’s an unholy union of a particular way of doing religion with a specific belief about what kind of nation America should be. In this way of thinking, governmental power would force citizens to live within a narrowly defined framework of religion, ethics, and morality. Only adherents of this specified religious nationalism would be counted as properly “religious” and appropriately “patriotic.”

— Christian Nationalism in a Nutshell

As for the substance of the Golda Meir quotes and Zionism, I recommended in my comments on FB and again recommend William Eichler, “Herzl’s Troubled Dream: The Origins of Zionism” in History Today 6th June 2023.

Zionism had succeeded in providing a state where Jews could determine their own fate. Israel would also prove a place of refuge for Holocaust survivors and for the estimated 800,000 Jews who would leave their homes in the Arab and Muslim world. Tragically, however, it achieved its aim through the colonisation of inhabited land. Palestine was no terra nullius; there was an indigenous population who would resist dispossession. Zionism’s supporters and detractors may wish to characterise it as either a movement of national liberation or settler colonialism. In reality, it is both.

Fifteen years ago I was in peak reading form!

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So my May 2009 archive shows….

Also enjoying South Sydney Uniting Church and becoming a cub reporter

South Sydney: Pentecost 2009

31 MAY

We had the Tongans in today. The singing was wonderful.

Sunday Floating Life photo 19: lunch at The Clarendon

24 MAY — Sirdan, B2 and I lunched at The Clarendon in Devonshire Street Surry Hills.

We had the $10 roast. (I think that’s Simon H. opposite Sirdan.)

And the cub reporter?

South Sydney and other matters

08 MAY — The May South Sydney Herald is out. Nothing by me in it, but I have just been playing boy reporter for the next one – among my activities that curtailed blogging a bit in the past two days.  (Other things included seeing Dr C, helping M, and tutoring plus some additions to my students’ pages.)

First the boy reporting gig. I attended a rather interesting Community Consultation meeting organised by the Redfern Legal Centre at Redfern Town Hall last night. The object of the meeting was to prepare community and individual submissions to the National Human Rights Consultation where public submissions are being accepted until 15 June.

The Consultation is a chance to hear people’s ideas about human rights and talk about ways to protect and promote human rights in the future.

Key Consultation Questions
  • Which human rights and responsibilities should be protected and promoted?
  • Are human rights sufficiently protected and promoted?
  • How could Australia better protect and promote human rights?

One thing that emerged for me is that it isn’t a simple matter. Several speakers drew attention to the big difference between legislating rights, or enshrining them in a “Bill of Rights”, and the actual situation in practice and in hearts and minds. We had a range of people including a former asylum seeker who had been in immigration detention for seventeen months but finally made it; interestingly he didn’t see his treatment (he was from Bangladesh) as having been racially motivated, though he did have quite a lot to offer about the system. There were speakers also from the Indigenous community, GLBT, disabilities and multicultural agencies. The chair – and he did an excellent job – was Professor Stuart Rees from the Sydney Peace Foundation.

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From last night.

(Dorothy just interrupted this post dropping off my bundles of South Sydney Heralds so later I will “do my rounds”.)

Second, another South Sydney matter that doesn’t concern me immediately: The Ravens. Andrew from South Sydney Uniting Church along with several others is running in the Sydney Morning Herald Half Marathon on 17 May, raising money for Breast Cancer Network Australia. Support the Ravens here.

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May 09 South Sydney Herald PDF Yes, there is an actual copy there!

And the peak reading not unrelated to the rebuilt Surry Hills Library

New Surry Hills Library: excellent

27 MAY —

Finding the door was a bit of a challenge at first, but what a building! See also Surry Hills: new community centre and library nearing completion. It isn’t just a pretty face either.

Project Details at a Glance

  • The new library will span two levels – the ground floor and the lower ground floor, and will be linked by a glazed atrium filled with plants. It will feature an expanded collection, dedicated children’s area and local studies area, more computers, a large magazine and periodicals area.
  • The neighbourhood centre will be located on the first floor and will provide flexible meeting rooms as well as a large public meeting room for up to 125 people. The community centre will also feature dedicated facilities for cooking classes and computer training.
  • A new child care facility will occupy the entire top floor, providing children with a large, safe, shaded play space open to the sky. There will be places for 26 children and the facility will be fully compliant with all current child care regulations.
  • The new centre sets a benchmark in environmentally sustainable design. To reduce reliance on air-conditioning an open-air atrium and rooftop plants will naturally filter the air, solar cells will provide power and tanks will collect rain water.

— Sydney City Council.

In the time it took me to take out my new books and DVDs around seven people joined the Library. Apparently there is a rush of new members.

Apparently the new Community Centre and Library opened yesterday.

Book reviews as promised…

25 MAY

Fiction

Certainly Siddon Rock has many fine moments and does evoke a rural setting and its period (the 1940s) very well, even if Persia is referred to as Iran and Pakistan, then non-existent, mentioned. Perhaps too I am tiring of magic realism, or, in our Australian context, the Wintonesque; when people wander around with blue spots floating above their heads I tend to turn off. Nonetheless, the novel is well worth reading.

Cut Her Dead is an effective crime fiction, but the best of this lot is the witty T is for Trespass.

Non-fiction

In a field where pseudohistory is rampant – think Da Vinci Code – this intelligent, well-written introduction is a must read. It is so refreshingly no-nonsense.

Excerpt:

Introduction: Recouping Our Losses

It may be difficult to imagine a religious phenomenon more diverse than modern-day Christianity. There are Catholic missionaries in developing countries who devote themselves to voluntary poverty for the sake of others, and evangelical televangelists who run twelve-step programs to ensure financial success. There are New England Presbyterians and Appalachian snake handlers. There are Greek Orthodox priests committed to the liturgical service of God, replete with set prayers, incantations, and incense, and fundamentalist preachers who view high-church liturgy as a demonic invention. There are liberal Methodist political activists intent on transforming society, and Pentecostals who think that society will soon come to a crashing halt with the return of Jesus. And there are the followers of David Koresh — still today — who think the world has already started to end, beginning with the events at Waco, a fulfillment of prophecies from Revelation. Many of these Christian groups, of course, refuse to consider other such groups Christian.

All this diversity of belief and practice, and the intolerance that occasionally results, makes it difficult to know whether we should think of Christianity as one thing or lots of things, whether we should speak of Christianity or Christianities.

What could be more diverse than this variegated phenomenon, Christianity in the modern world? In fact, there may be an answer: Christianity in the ancient world. As historians have come to realize, during the first three Christian centuries, the practices and beliefs found among people who called themselves Christian were so varied that the differences between Roman Catholics, Primitive Baptists, and Seventh-Day Adventists pale by comparison.

Most of these ancient forms of Christianity are unknown to people in the world today, since they eventually came to be reformed or stamped out. As a result, the sacred texts that some ancient Christians used to support their religious perspectives came to be proscribed, destroyed, or forgotten — in one way or another lost. Many of these texts claimed to be written by Jesus’ closest followers. Opponents of these texts claimed they had been forged.

This book is about these texts and the lost forms of Christianity they tried to authorize…

It is worth the price of admission for Chapter 4 alone, on Morton Smith and the “Secret Gospel of Mark”. Is it a forgery, and if so, whodunnit? Fascinating, whatever your own religious views. Ehrman delivers an open verdict.

See also Gospel Secrets: The Biblical Controversies of Morton Smith by Anthony Grafton in The Nation January 7, 2009. “The sexual undertones of the document have led some to suggest, explicitly or by innuendo, that Smith, a gay man, forged the text for personal reasons…”. From Grafton’s article:

In 1973, Morton Smith, professor of ancient history at Columbia University, shook the world–or at least the world of scholars who work on early Christianity. Fifteen years before, Smith had found an unknown document in the Mar Saba Greek Orthodox monastery, fifteen kilometers southeast of Jerusalem–an ancient Christian text that no one before him had ever mentioned. A letter in Greek, originally composed in the second century by a church father, Clement of Alexandria, and addressed to one Theodore, it was handwritten in ink, in an eighteenth-century hand, on the blank end pages of a seventeenth-century printed book. Less than a thousand words long but rich in detail, the text attacked one of the wonderfully named sects that made the early centuries of Christianity so complex–the followers of Carpocrates, or Carpocratians. These heretics, as Clement and Theodore saw them, claimed that they possessed a secret version of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus, they believed, had taught his followers that they were freed from the law and could do whatever they wanted without sinning. According to one of their Christian critics, Irenaeus, they actually thought they earned salvation by “doing all those things which we dare not either speak or hear of, nay, which we must not even conceive in our thoughts.”

Clement assured Theodore that he had been right to silence these “unspeakable teachings.” But he also admitted that there was a secret version of Mark’s Gospel–a version that the Church of Alexandria made available only to initiates. In a passage that Clement quoted, Jesus raised a rich young man from the dead in Bethany. “And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan”–a passage that suggests a libertine interpretation of its own, at least to the twenty-first-century reader. At the same time, Clement denied that an inflammatory phrase, “naked man with naked man,” which the Carpocratians had cited, came from the true secret Gospel. The evil Carpocrates had obtained a copy of the text and “polluted” it with lies.

It was an astonishing discovery…