by cameron | Jul 23, 2007 | Brisbane, Christianity, Uncategorized
Sitting in Brisbane with nothing much to do…
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Saw a great 2006 German film earlier at the Dendy in George Street called “Vier Minuten” or “Four Minutes”. It’s the story of an elderly lesbian piano teacher who works at a women’s prison and accepts a violent young student with massive natural talent to deal with her guilt from allowing her young female lover to be murdered by the Nazi’s 60 years earlier. Despite the negative review on IMDB, I really enjoyed it. Watch the trailer.
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Nick Hodge sent me this article by William Lobdell who for many years has written a column on religion for the L.A. Times. When he started, he was a “serious Christian”. However, by the end of his journey covering the crimes and perversities committed, endorsed and protected by Christians in the USA, he seems to have lost his faith. It seems that, even for “serious Christians”, the more you learn about Christianity, the less there is to like about it.
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by cameron | Jul 11, 2007 | Christianity, Iran, Uncategorized
Mike Moore gets stuck into Wolf on CNN:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bs_LBXD69w]
(via Chris Pirillo’s twitter)
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Remember Marc Rich? The guy indicted by Guiliani for trading illegally with Iran and tax evasion who then received a Presidential Pardon from Clinton in the last hours of his Presidency because he was a large donor to the Democratic Party? Well guess who his US attorney was from 1985 until 2000? None other than Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the current recipient of Presidential largess. Small world.
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Via CC Chapman:
Another amazing video from Britain Has Talent. Check out this 6 year old girl singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow. Bloody amazing.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En0A8KGMgq8]
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The iPhone is cool but – will it blend?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg1ckCkm8YI]
Thanks Leslie Nassar!
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Duncan Riley put me onto this online film called Zeitgeist. It’s an examination of the central mythologies of Christianity and showing where they come from. According to the doco, the vast majority of the Jesus stories in the New Testament are direct rip-offs from the story of Horus dating back to 2000BCE.
Check out these similarities. Pretty compelling stuff. Any of the Christians out there have a good answer?
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by cameron | Jun 13, 2007 | Christianity, Podcast, science vs religion
Reggie Finley Sr is “The Infidel Guy“. Since 1998 he has been hosting his own radio show/podcast about atheist thinking. We catch up to talk about podcasting business models, Atlanta, atheism, rational thinking, hip-hop, WMD, etc. If you want to add another great atheist podcast to your list, make sure you check out The Infidel Guy.
By the way, on his site today I found this image which I love.
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by cameron | May 29, 2007 | Christianity, science, science vs religion
Tonight we watched the first episode of a short-lived American series from 1999 called “ACTION“. I’d never heard of it before but this first episode was great. A little like a combination of The Office and Entourage. In fact, I’d be surprised if Marky Mark didn’t use this as part of the inspiration for Entourage. If you can track it down, check it out. Stars Jay Mohr as an arrogant Ari Gold-like Hollywood film producer and Illeanna Douglas as his former-child-star-turned -high-priced-call-girl-turned-Vice-President-of-Production. It was produced by Joel Silver. Apparently FOX only ran 8 episodes and then canceled it.
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Doc Searls has a post up about his religious beliefs, something that surprised me. I tried to leave him a comment (even registered on his site for permission) but got an error. Doc, for the record, it was:
Sorry! There was an error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “referer” hasn’t been defined.
The error was detected by Frontier 9.5 in mainResponder.respond. Webmaster: webmaster@userland.com. Time: Tue, 29 May 2007 06:56:52 GMT.
I tried several times.
Anyway, here’s the response I was trying to leave:
Doc, I’m surprised (an understatement!) to learn that you are a religious guy. The next time you come on G’Day World we’ll have to make that the topic of discussion! It’s been a regular theme lately.
I read Hedges piece and while it is obviously extremely well written, the flaws in it are deep and wide – as are the flaws in “faith” in general.
Let’s take your quote from above:
“This individualism… is a gift of the Abrahamic faiths.”
Perhaps Hedges has never heard of Socrates.
The Old Testament is replete with tribal doctrine. In fact the central tenant of the OT is that the Jews are the race beloved by Yahweh!
Examples:
Exodus 11 – God kills the firstborn of everyone in Egypt so “that ye may know how that the LORD doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.”
Exodus 32:27 And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.
Leviticus 25:45 Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.
And the list goes on and on and on.
The New Testament is no better.
Jesus (if you believe he even existed and, if he did, that the NT is any accurate record of what he might have said and did, there being zero historical evidence to either of these questions) also preached that anyone who didn’t listen to his messengers deserved to be brutally killed:
Matthew 10:15 Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.
Matthew 13:41 The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
So much for altruism and individual responsibility. Whilst the NT does say (briefly) to love they neighbour, the REAL message is:
Love thy neighbour… as long as they look like you and believe what you believe. If they disagree with you, kill them. If they like to have sex with men – kill them. Love them as long as they are Jews who agree with you. Everyone else is fair game.
The Code of Hammurabi, which pre-dates Moses’ laws by 600 years, established a public list of guidelines for individual conduct. This idea that Abrahamic ideas lead to the idea of individual responsibility is just vacuous.
In fact, in his book “Ideas: A History From Fire To Freud”, Peter Watson argues that the Catholic Church fought aggressively AGAINST the idea of “individual faith” as they (rightly) understood that this would diminish their temporal and spiritual power.
The main concern I have about faith is that is dulls the mind. It entreats people to accept untestable bronze age mythologies in a time when the human race needs, more than ever, all hands on deck. We won’t build a better world by clinging to 2000 year-old superstitions. We won’t build a better world by refusing to acknowledge scientific evidence. We won’t build a better world by hiding behind well-meaning phrases such as “love thy neighbour” – which, by the way, significantly pre-dates Christianity – while on the other hand using mythology to mobilize armies.
It’s my belief (yes, I don’t have evidence to support this particular theory… yet) that the only way for us to build a better world is for the human race (or, at least, the West) to jump fully into the 21st century – let go of our primitive bronze age belief systems (without completely denying their important role, for good and for bad, in our history) and accept the scientific method as the best way we’ve come up with so far to determine the facts of who we are and how the universe operates. Everything that we can’t verify with evidence is merely one of many theories and not something any rational person should believe in.
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You’ll be seeing a lot in the MSM today about Chavez shutting down Radio Caracas Television. The Rag Blog has a great interview with Noam Chomsky on Venezuela from Venezuelanalysis.com dated May 18. He talks about the polling in Venezuela that demonstrates the popularity of Chavez with the people. He is the first Government they have had in a long, long time who is actually taking steps to help the poor. Is he an evil dictator? Or a man of the people? I don’t know, but I know that the impression I get of him from mainstream media seems to be lopsided. The question is – why?
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Hey – are the LINKS in my posts showing up the RSS feed? I was just looking in Netvibes and I can’t see any links. There are about ten links in the post below. Can you see them? Is that broken along with the page breaks? (Yes, TPN IT is *still* trying to figure that out).
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“More than 10 percent (of Americans) think that Noah’s wife was Joan of Arc.”
I snorted with laughter when I read that this morning. It’s from an article in the NYT that Tony Harris sent me about Stephen Prothero’s book “Religious Literacy”. Other fun facts from the book are that
Approximately 75 percent of adults, according to polls cited by Prothero, mistakenly believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” Only half can name even one of the four Gospels, and — a finding that will surprise many — evangelical Christians are only slightly more knowledgeable than their non-evangelical counterparts.
Now… the next time I suggest that Christians (in general) aren’t the most well-educated or intelligent demographic on the planet, go easy on me, mmmkay? I’ve got hard data to back it up. Stand back ladies and gentlemen. Here comes the de-religification of the human race (yes I made that word up, see how clever I am??)
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My latest post for The Age is up. It’s called “Staying Naïve“.
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A great quote from Quotiki this morning to get you on your way:
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
– Unknown
When I was reading Anais Nin last night she mentioned that her therapist, Otto Rank (one of Freud’s contemporaries), showed her that the neurotic is just using their creative faculties in a misguided manner, that there isn’t anything wrong with them, they just need to use their creative powers with a new focus. I think this quote hits it on the head.
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Speaking of Freud, I just discovered that he committed “doctor-assisted suicide”.
A heavy cigar smoker, Freud endured more than 30 operations during his life due to mouth cancer. In September 1939 he prevailed on his doctor and friend Max Schur to assist him in suicide. After reading Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin in a single sitting he said, “My dear Schur, you certainly remember our first talk. You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense any more.” Schur administered three doses of morphine over many hours that resulted in Freud’s death on September 23, 1939.
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How many of you have installed the TPN version of Particls? Any feedback?
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So… has anyone installed Spinword? My best score on Spinword Eternal is still only 11860. Anyone beat that?
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Okay, Okay, I’m finally on Facebook. Here’s my profile. Holy frak, hasn’t this just gone nuts lately? I’ve had a bunch of invites saying people have added me as a friend, which I assume makes me part of their invite blast just after they joined themselves. I spent some time on it this morning and, unlike Second Life, in this case I *can* see what all the fuss is about. It’s simple, clean, huge amount of features, and of course yesterday’s announcement of the Facebook platform is just going to make it even more useful.
Cameron Reilly’s Facebook profile
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by cameron | Apr 30, 2007 | Christianity, climate change, energy debate, environment, media 2.0, movies
While I was working out today I watched “Land Of The Dead“, George Romero’s 2005 4th zombie flick, starring Aussie actor Simon Baker, Dennis Hopper, Asia Argento and John Leguizamo. What a great way to pass a couple of hours of otherwise-boring exercise.
Two things I loved in particular with the “Making Of” doco.
1. Romero talking about how Hopper decided he wanted to play the part of the bad guy, Kaufman, as Donald Rumsfeld and the way Romero yells “Exactly! This is about the Bush administration!” Too many directors are oh-so-politically correct (even now!), but not George, oh no. He tells it like it is!
2. The other thing I loved was George’s glasses:
When I saw the Ocean’s 13 trailer, with Elliott Gould wearing the same glasses, George Burns glasses, I said “I’ve got to have some!”
Anyone know where I can get some? Without real lenses of course. I have 20/20 vision (not like the rest of you geeks out there… how come I’ve read more books than the rest of you put together, I sit in front of a PC all day, and I *still* have 20/20?).
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Kevin Rudd is pitching himself at the ALP conference as “Mr 21st Century”. Yet, at the same time, he is content to wear his Anglican Christianity on his sleeve. I find it impossible to take anyone seriously who tries to position themselves as 21st century yet clings openly to a 2000 year-old mythology about a miracle worker who could fly.
That said, I admire his cojones in commissioning an Australian version of the Stern report. Do we really *need* another Stern report though? Isn’t one Stern enough Stern? Let’s face it – we call know not doing anything about climate change will be BAD. REALLY BAD. And those that continue to dispute that issue, aren’t going to be convinced by one more report, any more that Rudd will drop his Christianity by one more book pointing out that there is no evidence to support his mystery faith. It’s a waste of money.
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I see Dom Carosa’s been busy launching yet ANOTHER new site – NICE SHORTS. I stumbled on this (yes, using Stumble Upon) last night and watched a great clip by up-and-coming Aussie filmmaker Gabriel Dowrick.
His short film, “The Lord Is My Shotgun” is very impressive. I’ve got Gabe coming on G’Day World later in the week for a chat. I think he’s about 21 and has made something like 20 short films as well as a recent straight-to-dvd zombie slasher horror feature called “Nailed”.
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Did TWO – count ’em – TWO workouts today. 45 minutes on the xtrainer at 9am and then another 30 minutes at 5pm. Don’t want to be a fatblogger. I cannot for the life of me get interested in working out at 6am, so I tend to wake up, do email for a few hours, take the kids to school, and THEN get on the machine. And watch zombie flicks. I can pretend I’m running away from the flesh-eating zombies. SPEAKING of which… am I the only person who is surprised that with those rotten teeth they all seem to have, the zombies still manage to rip huge chunks of flesh, tendon and bone out of their victims? Shouldn’t their teeth just fall out when they try? Now there’s an idea for a postmodern zombie flick – the zombie’s attack, their teeth fall out, and everyone falls over laughing while the zombies spend the rest of the film trying to gum people to death….
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by cameron | Apr 21, 2007 | Australian politics, Christianity, Melbourne
I’m scanning the headlines this morning and see this one on News.com.au: “Priest claims praying ‘pointless’“. You just know that’s going to get my attention, right? I thought to myself “I can’t wait to show this to Father Bob!”
You should have heard me laugh when I opened it and read:
“SOUTH Melbourne priest Bob Maguire says church leaders across Australia can pray for rain “until they go black in the face” but it won’t solve the water crisis.”
I love it when Bob says what he really thinks and bucks the establishment.
This week’s episode of The Father Bob Show on TPN should be fun. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about our “duty of care” to the indigenous population of Australia and I want to talk to Bob about it.
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I have decided that I am a racist. And it bothers me deeply.
Let me explain. A racist isn’t just someone who thinks other races are inferior to one’s own. I’m not that kind of racist. A racist is also someone who values another race less than one’s own. And based on my growing understanding of the situation that the indigenous population of this country is in, combined with how little I have personally done about it, I have decided that I must have valued their lives less than I should. And I think that makes me a racist. And I’m going to change.
200 years ago, European Christians, mostly from Great Britain, came to Australia. They invaded the country. Committed an act of mass genocide. Stole the entire continent from its traditional owners. They took children from their families, as recently as 40 years ago, thrusting them into Christian educational institutions.
What reparations has the United Kingdom made? What reparations has Christianity made? What reparations have *I* made?
Me? What did *I* do to them?
Nothing directly. But I am profiting off of what was done to them.
What duty of care do the people of European descent in this country have to the descendants of the aboriginals who were treated so abhorrently?
It doesn’t matter if our direct ancestors weren’t involved. WE are still profiting from that theft. The asset that was stolen from the indigenous population, this land, is our greatest source of wealth and prosperity.
If scientists found a living dodo specimen, wouldn’t we all feel a duty of care for it, even though our direct ancestors may not have been the ones who wiped out the rest of the dodo population?
Why then don’t we feel the same duty of care for an entire race?
Saying ‘it was 200 years ago’ isn’t a justification. Only 60 years ago, the international community gave the Jewish people an entire country which hadn’t been theirs for thousands of years. That’s a precedent for reparations.
Let’s say that when Napoleon annexed Italy in 1796 it had stayed under French control until now. Do you think the international community would be telling France to give Italy back to the Italians? 200 years isn’t a long time.
What if Japan had successfully invaded Australia during WWII. What if they have murdered the majority of Australians, taken their land, their homes, their crops. What reparations do you think we would be demanding today? Would we be satisfied with an annual stipend and access to education? Would we be saying “well that was your parents, not the current generation, so nothing can be done to turn back the clock?”
West Germany paid reparations to Israel for the Holocaust. What is the statute of limitations on genocide?
The Australian Aboriginal people lived here for 40,000 – 75,000 years before the Christian invasion and genocide. It is estimated that there could have been 750,000 – 1,000,000 of them at that time. By the early 20th century the indigenous population had declined to between 50,000 and 90,000. Today there are less that 500,000 descendants.
A friend of mine, Andrew Mullins, put it to me this way a couple of years ago:
“What if scientists discovered a population of humans living deep in the jungles of the Amazon who had been around for 40,000 years? How do you think they would treat them? They would wrap them up in cotton wool and treat them with the utmost respect.”
He opened my eyes to something, I am embarrassed to admit, that I hadn’t given much thought to. It is my belief that the media, the government, and the education system in this country, in fact ALL of us in this country, have willfully and knowingly obfuscated and belittled the issue of our responsibility to the indigenous peoples of this country.
Now – giving back the land, moving 22 million people out of Australia, is obviously impossible. But what, then, do we do? I am increasingly uncomfortable with the general opinion I hear from other white people in this country that “we give them money and they get unequaled access to opportunities – what more do they want?”.
We cannot wash our hands of this.
Russell Buckley asked me recently:
“What are we doing today that our descendants will look back on in disbelief and ask themselves how on earth we could have done that, thinking it was normal, or certainly harmless?”
I think perhaps our minimal concern over our duty of care to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia is one of those things.
