Tetherd Cow Ahead

I snapped this sign in front of St Paul’s Cathedral, in inner city Melbourne last week.

The duplicity of the intent here is only eclipsed by its inanity. Professor Nancey Murphy is the author of ‘Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will’. She is also an ordained minister of The Church of the Brethren, a Christian sect so confused that it has split into numerous splinter groups that are, apparently, able to interpret the Word of God to be whatever suits their personal agenda. ((It should be said that The Brethren are not alone in this pursuit. Christianity itself is really just one big collection of groups that have decided that what God meant is dependent on your point of view.)) If Prof Murphy is a hard core member of The Brethren, though, she believes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God (with all that entails).

My brain finds it hard to contain the idea that someone can take that stance and still call themselves a scientist. Her interpretation of what science is, seems, apparently, to be as flexible as the interpretation of God’s Word among members of her belief system.

As for ISCAST, ‘a think tank exploring the interface between science and Christianity’, I have prepared a little diagram illustrating what I see as the principal difficulty in exploring that interface:

You see, when you accept the idea that a magical being created us and everything we see for inscrutable purposes of its own, you have abandoned all notions of science. Now, personally speaking, I don’t care one whit if Professor Murphy or anyone else cares to invent such fanciful stories, but it pisses me off when:

1: They think they have the right to push those ideas down my throat, and,
2: They think their ideas are better than everyone else’s ideas because their magical being told them so, and,
3: They attempt to conflate those ideas with science.

But I said ‘duplicity’ didn’t I?

I was intending to make this post a humorous jab at a daft sign, but in looking up St Paul’s Cathedral I inadvertently stumbled upon one of the most worrying, irrational, fearful and misleading documents I’ve seen in a long time. St Paul’s, it appears, is affiliated with an organization called Transforming Melbourne, a group that defines itself as ‘a Movement of Christians praying and acting together with the vision that God will renew His Church and not only bring new life to the people of our city, but transform its culture and society.’

Praying? Not a lot of science there, that’s for sure.

The document I mentioned is called ‘The Vital Role of the Church and Christian Faith in Our Society’ by Rob Isaachsen, Founder of Transforming Melbourne, and is something of a manifest of the group’s ideals. The preamble to it on the Transforming Melbourne site begins:

MPs, Christians and others have no idea that

OUR SOCIETY DEPENDS ON CHRISTIAN FAITH AND THE CHURCH

It then lists some ‘statistics’ that are supposed to convince us of how terrific the Christian Church is, before concluding:

The highly intentional atheist and secular humanist movements are seeking to influence governments to remove the freedom of the Church and Christian agencies to provide their community support, and Christian education programmes and Chaplaincy in schools which foster Christian values in society.

If they succeed in restricting Christian care and education the result will be the undermining of society itself.

This kind of addled fear-mongering makes my skin crawl and my blood boil. Yes folks, what it comes down to is that the people behind Transforming Melbourne believe that the EVIL ATHEISTS are attempting to get rid of the WONDERFUL CHRISTIANS because, for some reason, the EVIL ATHEIST agenda is to ‘undermine society itself’. Do these people really think like that? Are they really that simple-minded? Because if that’s the case it’s pretty damn clear why I don’t want Christian chaplains giving moral advice to my kids.

So it turns out that the real reason that the Cathedral is having Science Week is nothing at all to do with science (surprise) but is in fact a sleight-of-hand designed to give the appearance of open-mindedness and acceptance. There is no intent to explore an ‘interface’ between science and religion here. Make no mistake: these people do NOT care about science. If it was up to them, they’d as soon see their God wipe this troublesome ‘science’ thing from the planet.

What’s happening here is that they are afraid. Scientific thought represents the biggest real threat that religion will ever face. And now, with atheists and humanists asserting their human rights to create communities that are not built on superstition and fear, but instead on critical thinking, scientific inquiry and rationally considered ethics and morals, the Christian Church is resorting to one of its favourite techniques: instead of facing their challengers bravely, ((For surely, if their God is actually right as they claim, they have NOTHING to fear…)) they are attempting to subsume them. To make them feel at home. To feign charity. To pretend they’re on their side. But all they are really concerned with is promoting their agenda.

It has worked many times in the past when their competition was also fearful and held irrational beliefs, but this time it won’t.

(I’m going to examine some of the Transforming Melbourne document in the next post. It’s full of such egregious and erroneous claims that it simply can’t go unconfronted.)

Over the weekend, Violet Towne and I visited the Monash Gallery of Art to see an exhibition of photographs by Anton Bruehl. Bruehl was born in Australia, but made his career in New York where he became a favourite of the advertising world, creating photographs for Vanity Fair, Vogue and other high profile magazines. I always thought Bruehl was quite famous, but am dismayed to find that he doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry. You will almost certainly have seen his iconic photograph of Marlene Dietrich:

I really like Bruehl’s highly contrived and art-directed style and I think it has gone on to inform artists as diverse as David Lynch and Pierre et Gilles. The highlight of this exhibition for me, though, was some work Bruehl did for Vanity Fair, photographing the ‘Fashions of the Future’: clothing visions from designer Gilbert Rhodes. This is Rhodes’ speculation for the Man of the Future:

And here is that very man in the flesh, as realised by Rhodes and capture on film by Bruehl:

Is that awesome or what? The best thing here is, of course, that Rhodes got hardly any of it right. Well, I guess there is still a good part of the century to go, but you know what I’m saying… I suppose there are disposable socks (those ones they give you on planes) and the ‘antenna snatching radio out of the ether’ could charitably be interpreted to be the one in your iPhone, but the curly beard and the baggy onesie tucked into those disposable socks have yet to materialize. As for the utility belt, well, even Batman had trouble making that seem like a good idea.

I quite took to the Man of the Future’s jaunty disregard for anyone’s opinion of his haute couture, but I was rather more enamored of Rhodes’ vision for the Woman of the Future:

Alright! Now we’re talking!

I’m afraid, however, that I was so overcome by the prospect of what we bearded, antenna-sporting, disposable sock-wearing blokes have to look forward to in the next few years that my hand was shaking rather a lot when I tried to snap a shot of Rhodes’ and Bruehl’s vision of said woman.

It seems that, for a year or two at least, chaps, we’ll just have to live in anticipation.

By way of explanation for the non-Australians: earlier this year the northern parts of the east coast of Australia were devastated by rain and floods, significantly damaging the large banana crops that are grown there. As a consequence, the price of bananas has more than tripled throughout the land, and they have become something of a luxury item in recent months. Pic comes courtesy of Cissy Strutt who snapped this in her ‘hood.

When I was a kid, the best possible present you could get for your birthday was an Iced Vovo. This morning, as coincidence would have it, I came across this photo of me taken on my third birthday with my Dad making all my birthday wishes come true. Of course, the Iced Vovo was a much more decent size back then, as I mentioned in the last post.

[NB: Iced Vovos were not actually this big. I have achieved this illusion through the use of digital photo manipulation software called ‘Photoshop’. Some of my designer friends use Photoshop every day in their work, so it’s unlikely they will fall for such hijinks, of course!]

When I was a kid, the best treat you could possibly be offered was a pick from a plate of Iced Vovos. The Iced Vovo is a confection completely native to Australia, and, as far as I’m aware, has never spread beyond these shores. The Iced Vovo consists a biscuit crust overlaid with pink fondant ((NOT marshmallow – that was an entirely different treat, and, in my opinion, a rather more predictable one.)) which is bisected by a strip of raspberry jam. It is my memory that the Iced Vovo was a lot bigger when I was a kid, and has now sort of shrunk to a much less generous-sized item. I have asked numerous people about this, and everyone seems to be in agreement. It’s one of those things that’s rather hard to substantiate of course, there being no ancient Vovos still in existence. I do hold the fond hope that someone, somewhere in the 1960s thought to take a photograph of an Iced Vovo with a ruler for scale.

As much as I’m disparaging of journalists, I do encounter, very occasionally, some smart ones. Annabel Crabb, from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is such a writer. You may remember my very long post about modern artistic endeavour The King is Dead! Long Live the King! in which I discussed how we’ve come to value art (in a monetary sense) and speculated on its true worth. I did speak briefly about the status quo of journalism in that post, but mostly concerned myself with my own field of music.

It’s encouraging for me to see Annabel asking, in her article Finding a coin for the journalistic juke box, some of the same questions I did. When you propose an heretical idea, it’s nice to know that you’re not actually mad.