Trying to look annoyed
Posted by eN0ch in Politics and society on 4 February 2012
Until recently I thought the hardest thing about being snapped (by a camera) was putting on a smile that actually lasted, looked sublime, didn’t make me look a dork, and ticked all the above boxes while looking “natural” (whatever that is). But now I know differently. Yesterday I spent about 30 minutes at the local Werribee Train Station, trying to look annoyed to the satisfaction of a local newspaper photographer and her (future) consumers. At least with smiling, I do actually do it now and then, like those times when no one but me got my joke. So my face is accustomed to the required muscular contortions, even if my teeth aren’t quite Hollywood standard. However looking annoyed, facially and staturely (made up word, there) and doing so for 30 minutes, in numerous poses, on a (stationary) train, off the train, in front of the slowly moving train, and all to the entertainment of bemused onlookers … ’twas nothing if not challenging.
Fellow Wyndhamites will shortly be treated to the spectacle of my severely misshapen face, torso and spindly legs somewhere in the vicinity of an article in one of our local rags about the delights of public transport in our fair city. (Just watch the “Wyndham Weekly”, formerly “the Banner”). Please don’t let your children or grandchildren see it, however. Anyone looking as mad as I apparently succeeded in doing on this occasion would produce nightmares aplenty, I’m sure.
What was that you asked? …. Oh, you’re wondering as to the cause of my time in the sun? Well it all started the day I contributed to a smartphone-based survey of travelling on Melbourne trains during peak hour. You know, the great waltz of the sweating sardines … One thing led to another, climaxing with a recent e-mail submission to a local journo. It went like this:-
Hi Grant,
Photos at train stations are fine, if desired.
My main passions on the subject are more directly about local buses, but rail infrastructure is a major feature in the equation. I’ll raise a smaller (relatively) issue first, followed by a more ‘macro’ one.
Bus service
Until sometime in the past maybe 2 years, our local bus route (443) ran services 40 minutes apart, meaning a bus for every second train. We all thought that was lousy and couldn’t imagine it getting any worse. Even with the services at that level, we generally needed to drive our children to the station for their train journeys to school, despite the presence of a bus stop a few hundred metres away at the end of our street.
Now the bus services are hourly, whilst train services have actually increased (during peak). So you might strike it lucky if the train you want happens to connect to a bus, but usually not.
Then you add to the mix the low level of patronage on the bus service, which I’m sure is directly linked to its infrequency. i.e. you can’t factor the buses into your commuting routines or strategies, so the few buses that come are an irrelevance, so no one rides on them. And partly because so few people catch the buses, we frequently have buses running early (yes, that’s right). I’m told this happens due to the drivers not noticing that they’ve reached point ‘X’ on the route 2 minutes ahead of schedule. That presumably happens because the scheduling has been calculated on the assumption of stopping ‘Y’ times. But with so few patrons to pick up or let off, there are hardly any stops made. So then the few intending passengers miss their bus as it sails past the stop in the distance, 2 minutes ahead of schedule.
So the end result: our local bus route is functionally irrelevant to our lives and routines, so may as well not run at all. (And btw – we live 5 minutes from the Werribee train station.) So whenever we or any of our neighbours catch a train (our adult children do so most week days for work; my wife and I do so occasionally), we have no option but to drive … which leads to my second point:
Rail commuter parking
With no effective / reliable bus service, commuters in our neighbourhood have to drive themselves to catch a train. But where do they park? Well if they’re an early bird, then no worries – they park in the train station carpark. But the carpark, despite being one of the biggest station carparks I’m aware of anywhere, is full by about 7:30am. Any one of the hundreds (more?) wanting a train after that has to fight for a kerbside parking space in one of the residential streets around. We’ve watched over the past few years as parked cars have taken over suburbia like a hungry and growing metallic blob emanating out from the station and local CBD. Our kids used to park in a street a minute’s walk from the station carpark, which is on the opposite side of both the station and the CBD from the side we live in. But that was before the local residents, quite understandably, rose up in arms about their constantly congested street. So the council installed 2 hour parking signs, meaning the day-long commuters have to park in other streets further out.
So our kids (and their peer hordes) now park in streets this side of both the station and the CBD. That’s where I also park if needing a train. I have long legs and a swift walk, and can get to the station from my car in maybe 5 minutes (depending on traffic at the two sets of pedestrian lights in between). I reckon it would take many people closer to 10 minutes. With Wyndham’s rate of growth, it can only be a matter of time before large swathes of our neighbourhood have become an extension of the station carpark, due to a combination of more cars needing to be parked and more streets out from the CBD getting parking signs.
In short – it’s clear to me that some combination of multi-level parking at the train station and a major funding increase for local bus services is essential to prevent inner Werribee from becoming a congestion nightmare in the next decade. But I doubt that any such investment is even on the state government’s radar.
Train carriage crowding
All of that, of course is before one even gets to the station to catch a crowded train. I have less personal testimony on the train carriages themselves. But I can comment from a handful of experiences where I’ve found myself on an evening peak train returning to Werribee from the city. I’m likely to start my journey at Flinders Street or Southern Cross, meaning I’ll usually get a seat. But I’ve observed fellow travellers in my own carriage, also bound for Werribee, actually standing sometimes right through as far as Hoppers Crossing (the last station before Werribee, which is the end of the line).
Ticket to ride, and ride, and ride, and ….
Posted by eN0ch in Letters, Politics and society, The Age on 7 January 2012
Those folks who say Melbourne’s Skybus isn’t good value just haven’t considered the technology. Granted the tickets have barcodes. But from my experience yesterday, the limited barcode scanning capacities of the nineteenth century holepunch used on my ticket offer excellent value for minimum enterprise.
Runs and rupees
Posted by eN0ch in Letters, Politics and society, The Age, World on 6 January 2012
“Should Australia continue to increase its economic ties with India?” (The Age, Reader poll, 5/1) Well absolutely, if Clarke keeps batting like this.
A bigger vision
Posted by eN0ch in Faith, Letters, Politics and society, The Age on 5 January 2012
Australian Marriage Equality convener, Alex Greenwich (The Age, 5/1), needs to listen a little more to religious community concerns on gay marriage. Proposed legislation “assur(ing) churches they would not be forced to marry gay couples” may offer some consolation. (Although overseas experience suggests such protection may be temporary anyway.) However for those people of faith who oppose the redefinition of marriage, the central concerns are broader and deeper than the impact of gay marriage on the church itself or it’s ministers. We believe such a change would be to the profound detriment of future generations and of our whole society, not just ourselves. Others are fully entitled to disagree with our worldview. But any serious discussion of this vexed subject must reckon with the scope of our unease, which will not be assuaged by some self-directed political deal.
Generally speaking, the more profound the proposed cultural change the longer and more patient the debate required, if trust is not to be a casualty. This national conversation has barely begun. Now is not the time for legislative haste.
The voice of experience
Posted by eN0ch in Letters, Politics and society, The Age, World on 15 December 2011
Two PMs? We know all about it. But how many independents?
Don’t thank us
Posted by eN0ch in Letters, Politics and society, The Age on 4 November 2011
If you’re one of our customers directly affected by the grounding, you can look forward to a special thank-you … (Fullpage Qantas ad, The Age, 4/11)
Don’t tell me; let me guess. “Thank you for not flying Qantas”?
An uglier game
Posted by eN0ch in Letters, Politics and society, The Age on 27 September 2011
The race to the moral bottom has gone viral, it seems. No longer confined to our major politics, it now infects our major religions too. The next time you put on your football scarf, there’s more to worry about than who’s out injured. Now you can ponder what proportion of your membership dues or gate takings is being invested off the field, in protecting your club’s pecuniary interest in the shattered lives of problem gamblers and their loved ones, whose finals will be anything but grand.
The God-shaped hole
This is the text of my sermon from last Sunday. The audio file is available on my podcast as usual, which is why I don’t normally post my text anymore. But a few people have asked about this one, and it does seem to have been “one out of the box” in some ways. May God use it for his glory in whatever form.
Sermon text: Ecclesiastes 3:1-15. Preached at All Saints’ Greensborough.
Introduction
Time … It’s the element of our lives we most wish we could manipulate, and yet the one we least control. More often than not, if anything, it seems to control us!
Time travel is one of the core elements of nearly every sci-fi book or movie. And it takes it’s place so well in that genre because fiction is just what it is! .. We frequently use phrases like “if I had my time over ..”, knowing full well that it will never happen, ever!
I could keep going .. Time is one of the great levellers of the universe, because everyone has it in precisely equal measure. I have 24 hours in my day; so do you; so does the Prime Minister; so does everyone.
Rupert Murdoch may have 70% of our nation’s print media readership, yet he has just the same quantity of time as the man in the Centrelink queue.
The woman waiting for the bus that’s already ten minutes late, has no more and no less time than you have when the 5pm deadline is looming, and the boss wants the report.
When I have a sermon to prepare and 3 meetings to attend, I’m no richer in time than any one of the homeless people in our streets.
Time … When something is both: foundational to life and existence – and full of riddles – then one of the most consistent ways we clueless humans respond is to sing about it. (Just consider how very few songs there’d be on the radio if life, the world and people made sense .. if men understood women and vice-versa .. if romance and romantic relationships were entirely logical and predictable .. if the ways of God were transparent to the human mind. What would be left to sing about?!)
Welcome back to the wonderful and perplexing book of Ecclesiastes … And our host and guide to the riddles of life is this man who styles himself “the Teacher”. In chapter 1 he’s identified himself, by implication, as King Solomon. But he seems to want us to know him as “the Teacher”. That’s how the NIV renders it, which I think is reasonable. (It’s a typical rendering of the Hebrew Qoheleth, which seems really to be a kind of title, for a person who presides over an assembly, with a particularly academic or teaching bent.) So “the Teacher” is what I’ll call him from this point on …
The Teacher has taken his iPad (just like this one here …) and headed down Main St to study life. (Or as Glen put it two weeks ago, to take a PhD in life ..) If he were more of a Luddite, I suppose he’d have taken a clipboard and pen. But he strikes me as a pretty hip kind of guy, so I’m sure he’d have used an iPad. And so far he’s examined the monotony of life .. and he’s considered life through the filters of philosophy, wealth & pleasure – especially the latter! He’s had a darned good look at that angle, denied himself nothing (2:10). In the language of the 1960s he’s lived the life of sex, drugs & rock ‘n roll (right there in chap 2, in just about as many words). .. But that left him with .. a few clues, but far more questions than answers ..
And now he’s moved on to this great riddle of time. And like so many others in the face of mystery, song has been his way to express mystery .. We have no music, but certainly verse (3:1-8) .. to expound the mysterious yet undeniable phenomenon of the ordered and yet uncontrollable character of time. And if you were a rocker in the ’60s, then you may have grown up listening to it [iPhone into mic] Turn! Turn! Turn!, written by Pete Seeger in 1954.
A song about life and time 3:1-8
At first glance, it sounds like a song of monotony. A time for this, and a time for that .. and round and round it goes, day in, day out, week after boring week, year after year – when can I get off?! .. But if you listen a little more closely, you may discern a world, which though mystery-filled, is a world of beauty and order. In fact “beautiful” is what he calls it in his analysis at v11 .. but there’s a sign of that right in the opening verse: 1 There’s a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.
Seasons .. How depressing would your life be if there were no seasons .. if nothing ever changed? .. if there was no contrast? We say we’d like an endless summer, but we don’t mean it, do we? Who’d want twelve months of sweat, flies, mozzies & sunburn?! So is it not a cause celebré that under God’s providential care, life is rich in variety, and the year has its seasons?
But then the riddles really do start: The big one, the big riddle, that undergirds and encompasses all the others is near the top in verse 2. NewsFlash, folks: Life itself .. your life .. is not in your control! .. There’s a time to be born, and a time to die – both determined by someone else.
Are you unhappy with the timing of your birth .. ? Too close to Christmas ? Well too bad .. who’re you going to complain to? Your parents? .. They may have planned your conception .. but not much about your birth was in their control any more than it was in yours!
And it’s no different with death. Just a week ago, the world was reminded how little control anyone has over the timing of their death. It came very prematurely and without warning to 3000 people in NY a decade ago.
And it goes the other way as well. Several years ago I conducted the funeral of a dear sister in Christ, aged 101. The order of service for the funeral had been planned by Doris herself, and we used, I think, draft 4 or 5. Draft 1 had been penned 22 years earlier.
At 79 Doris decided she had lived long, well and happily enough in her Lord’s service, and was ready to go home. But the Lord, it seemed, did not share her perspective on time. In fact he took no notice at all. And so over those 20+ years a succession of ministers and elders had been asked why she had not yet been taken, and none could provide an answer, and heaven remained silent the whole time.
Her puzzlement only increased when her eldest son turned 65 and retired, and death was no closer. What was she doing with a son that age?! But the silence continued, and so did the family retirements. Finally – unseasonably late from her perspective, Doris received her reward.
So the Teacher’s right .. There is a time to be born and a time to die, and neither is in your remit. And – that template of start / finish .. flourish / decay .. living / dying, is stamped on every sphere of existence:
- in the garden (a time to plant / uproot) 2b
- in human relationships (kill / heal) 3a
- even on the building site and in your workshop (tear down / build) 3b
Between life’s bookends of birth & death are the endless cycles, which occupy the middle lines of the song: joy & sadness .. close relationships & more distant or guarded ones .. valuing what we have and holding material things lightly …. all seasons of a life lived under the direction of the One who alone drives it.
And having begun the song with birth and death .. the Teacher ends it (v8) with the positive and negative poles that unite or divide people and nations. There’s a time for:
- love & hate
- war & peace
Asking why
When Pete Seeger wrote the song “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, he went no further than v8. And if you too stopped there you might well wonder whether time is just a merciless tyrant, who keeps us all chained to a perpetual treadmill of futility. And if you thought that about time itself, you might think no better of the God who stands behind time.
… which is why you need to keep following the Teacher in his enquiry into life. The song is a description of how the world works. And Ecclesiastes is full of Descriptions & observations of life (I saw .. I have seen .. ). And along with the observations are plenty of sometimes brutally frank exclamations of how senseless and unfair this life seems to be … And yet interspersed here and there among them are moments of insight, and statements like this: I turned my mind to understand (7:25) …
In other words, he asks “why?” .. And in asking why, he demonstrates the power of seeking, when what you’re living in is an ordered universe. If you look at the world, life, with all its riddles .. and you ask why .. and again .. and keep on asking, will you always find answers .. ? No. Will there still be mysteries .. ? Yes, and plenty of them! But if you keep seeking, asking .. from time to time, you might just feel the breath of God in your own circumstances, or glimpse his shadow in the confronting puzzles of the world around you.
Ecclesiastes gives you permission to ask the riddles, to air the doubts, to say how unfair it all seems to be. To do so is no enemy to the life of faith. But if you read this book, and stay with the Teacher .. then it won’t let you stop at the riddles & doubts. It will draw your eye to the ultimate reality beyond the present puzzle. .. In other words, it will bring you face to face with God.
That’s why Pete Seeger should have read beyond verse 8. Because the following verses set the undoubtable mysteries of time against the backdrop of eternity.
The first few lines of the Teacher’s analysis of the mind-numbing merry-go-round that time seems to be, are brutally honest. Starting in v9: “What’s the point of it all!?”, he rales. What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. .. One thing you can’t accuse the Teacher of doing is airbrushing the picture of life in God’s world. He hasn’t tucked his very human wrestling away in some obscure footnote on p.497 where no one will ever find it. .. It’s right there in public view, in the first breath of analysis.
Life – receive it with thankfulness
I don’t know about you. But at that point I’d feel like grabbing the Teacher by the lapels, and demanding some answers. “For pities sake, give us some hope! Where’s the good news?! ..” But the Teacher is committed to an exhaustive study of life. And he’s just not going to cut to the chase soon enough for C21st people in a hurry. There are not a lot of answers to life’s riddles in the book of Ecclesiastes, at least until the end in chapter 12 – and even then he won’t spoon feed them to us. So we’ll need to be patient a while longer .. But if we are patient, there are clues to hold us along the way, morsels of wisdom to chew on. And one of those is a gentle invitation to a thankful life .. to acquire a habit of receiving all that life brings, its blessings be they many or few, as gifts from the hand of a purposeful God.
It’s an invitation echoed many times in the NT letters. It’s more than implied by Paul in Romans 8, when he muses that if God would not withhold from us even the very life of his only Son .. then can there be any doubt that with Christ he would give us all things. (Rom 8:32) And in other letters he says it more directly as a command: e.g. Eph 5:20 always give thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
As disciples of Jesus, we are those from whom the Creator God has held back nothing, and so we have causes for thankfulness the Teacher in his time could scarce have imagined. But even he, centuries before Christ, could look at life with all its riddles and reflect at the end of chapter 2: A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment? .. And here in chapter 3 he returns to the same thought at v12 … there is nothing better … than to be happy … to do good … [to] eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all … toil—this is the gift of God.
So there’s one of the clues that Pete Seeger didn’t wait to find. Life doesn’t need to be free of mystery for us to receive it again and again and again, daily, in a spirit of thankfulness to the One who gives it so freely and in abundance. Keep asking the riddles, but recognise the gift and be thankful. And in being thankful, you may find the fear of God …
Lost hearts longing for home
… And that’s not the only clue in these few verses after the song. Something dawns on the Teacher, just after his honest rant in vv9f … Perhaps God has a reason for laying this burden on human beings. Is this not the God who makes everything beautiful in its time? (v11) Nature and creation tell us that it’s so. So then, why .. do we experience so much disappointment in life? Why?! .. And he seems to conclude that it’s because God has set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. Now what does that ponderable line mean … ?
I’ll take the 2nd half first. It means simply – you are not God. I am not God. So don’t imagine that it will ever be in your power to find the answer to every conundrum in the universe. Don’t make the presumption that eternal mysteries will simply dissolve into plain logic on your say so.
You are not God .. And yet, we are made in the image of this God who is eternal, and that image is planted deeply in our beings. God is eternal, vast, without beginning / end. We are finite, tiny, fleeting, frail. There is a vast chasm between us and God .. and yet, God has placed in us an ache for the eternal. A kind of a homing device, fixed to our souls ..
And that simply means that no human being will ever be satisfied, fulfilled or at peace, except in relationship with Him. The 60s generation tried sex, drugs & rock ‘n roll, and it gave them a few thrills – but it left them largely restless and as unsatisfied as ever. The Teacher wouldn’t recommend that path, .. but he’d understand it only too well. (He’s tried it!) And his diagnosis I think would be that it’s one of the innumerable symptoms of lost hearts longing for home, and taking just a few of the vast array of wrong turns along the way.
The Teacher lived a long time ago. But God has raised up successors to him in the many generations since, and a number of them expressed very similar insights. Let me tell you about three of them – in reverse order historically:
• C S Lewis (writer, English scholar, mid-C20th) – [paraphrasing] [Cars are designed by people] to run on petrol, and [they wouldn’t] run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on himself. He is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. [And no other food will satisfy].’
• Blaise Pascal (French, mathematician, C17th) – There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.
• St Augustine (great Christian teacher, C5th) – Lord, you made us for yourself, and our heart is restless, until it rests in You.
Three great post-biblical Christian thinkers, all merely re-echoing the mind of the Teacher centuries before Christ, his wisdom handed down to us in Scripture.
If time strikes you as a merciless merry-go-round that won’t let you off .. or if life seems like a burden devoid of purpose .. then it’s simply that your heart is restless, longing to know the God who created you, and who has made his love unambiguously known in his Son Jesus.
Conclusion
Is there something in this life that you crave, and just want more, and more of it? And then you get more, and soon want more again!!? … Another job .. promotion .. better car .. a house in a more pleasant neighbourhood, or with more rooms .. a more attractive wife / a more useful husband .. better technology …. that holiday you’ve been dreaming of .. another DIY project .. a redecorated living room .. professional recognition .. seats at the world cup (of whatever your favourite sport is) .. ? And if you got it, would you be satisfied … ?
Please recognise that you keep wanting it [or more of it .. or an extra dose of it], precisely because it is never enough – and it never, ever will be. It may tantalise you with some short or medium term reward. But it can never satisfy you, and it will never give your heart rest. There is a divinely implanted homing device fixed in your soul. And the signal it keeps on sending out is an ache for eternity, and nothing however pleasing or tasty or attractive or richly upholstered in this earthly life will cause it to cease transmitting, because it is your heart’s innate longing for the eternal. God made you for himself, and knowing him personally, and experiencing his love tangibly, and trusting him completely .. nothing but that can and will satisfy. And without that satisfaction, your heart, your spirit will still be restless and half empty forever.
If you’ve never known that satisfaction, or if it’s become a memory more than a present reality, then can I encourage you to reach out [again] for the eternal life that Jesus will give to all who come to him. And let me encourage you to ask some people you trust to pray with you for your heart’s rest.
More evidence that God uses a mac
I’ve discovered an even better method of using my iPad as a preacher, and surely further proof that there will be no Windows in heaven. One of those serendipitous discoveries when searching for something else … I think it might help others too. Now I imagine there might be ways for the recalcitrant to do this from a PC, but I wouldn’t know. Another reason to repent of your Windows allegiance .. (but I digress .. )
I discovered that Pages ((current) ’09 mac desktop version – not the iPad version) can export to the .epub book reader format, which is the ebook format recognised by iBooks (and also some other book readers). If you then load that file into “Books” in iTunes, and sync your iPad, you then have your sermon notes as an eBook rather than a PDF. So that means you’ll find it in the ‘books’ section of iBooks on your iPad, rather than the ‘PDF’ section.
That’s where the beauty starts 
You have much more reader interface power at your disposal than with a PDF:
• You can increase or decrease the font size right on the device with a few finger taps (so no more bothering about font size, page size and margin size in your desktop word processor), and
• You’ll notice that swapping the iPad between landscape and portrait orientation also has the effect of offering you the choice of a single page / whole screen view, or a paperback-novel-type view with two small pages side-by-side – and the illusion of flipping real pages in a real book as you read.
The latter feature means, in theory at least, easier adaptation from paper notes to electronic – irrespective of whether your brain is used to speaking from full A4 single-side notes or from something like an A5 ring binder or display book printed double-side. My 30-year pattern has been the latter, so having made this discovery I’m now using landscape mode and it almost feels like I’m using my familiar binder
What you can’t, of course, do with this method is annotate your notes on the iPad. So if doing that is important for the way you work, then I guess you’d be wiser sticking with PDF and something like GoodReader. But if it works for you to do all your annotating, highlighting etc on your desktop before syncing – then I think this method would be hard to beat. It would mean buying Pages for your mac if you don’t already have it, but you don’t need to spend a cent on any iPad apps.
Let’s have a real debate
Posted by eN0ch in Faith, Politics and society on 30 May 2011
The recent publication of Lindsay Tanner’s “Sideshow” has in some sense given us all permission to question the health of politics in Australia, and especially of political coverage by media outlets. Tanner’s very valid concerns have a much wider application, however, than politics itself. The age of instant global communications – with it’s doorstop interviews, sound bites, tweets, banal slogans, character attacks and spin, is fast altering the complexion of public discourse on all manner of subjects. It’s largely not for the better, and intelligent debate is one major casualty.
The present assault on religious education and chaplaincy in state schools is but one example, and part of a wider media phenomenon. In a free, democratic and diverse society it’s only to be expected that the place of religious belief in public life will be debated. This is as it should be, and neither Christians nor other faith believers should fear such engagement in the public square. However in the interests of balanced and informed dialogue a bit of common wisdom in how the debate is conducted might go a long way, if it is to merit the term “debate”.
The basics of constructive debate include inter alia caution with hearsay, resisting conspiracy theories, attention to the meaning of language peculiar to certain groups, and great care when quoting phrases without a context. What is frustrating about much of the coverage thus far in the print media generally, and The Age in particular, is the singular lack of attention to such values, even by seasoned commentators. It shows in some of the alarmist and polarised language now being used by columnists and taken up by some among their consumers. The subject is too important, however, to be reduced to trite sloganeering or half-baked analysis.
Recent reporting, for instance, has rendered famous the use of the phrase “make disciples” in connection with the work of Access Ministries in Victorian state schools. Fuelled apparently by apocalyptic visions of defenceless children before an invading force, armed to the teeth with black bibles, handcuffs and mobile pulpits, angst rages through letters columns and talkback radio segments. Digital space is all abuzz with lines like “Lie to kids”, “Out to convert” and “Caught lying again.” Not so very different from the political headlines we see these days, and hardly more sophisticated. What’s also in common is the creeping replacement of thoughtful social analysis with sound bites targeting people and denigrating characters, but yielding little actual insight.
Like any organisation or professional circle, the Christian community uses peculiar sets of words, phrases, images and metaphors, some drawn from the Bible itself, others from a variety of contexts in Christian history. Just as it would be unwise for a layman to draw conclusions from language used in a medical conference, a constitutional debate or a sci-fi chatroom (among an endless list), so it serves none of us well to lift an evocative phrase from a very specific faith context, and broadcast it in the public domain without the most careful of research. Doing so may make for arresting headlines, but it too rarely serves the cause of truth. Without truth, trust diminishes and constructive debate becomes impossible.
Slogans commonly represent a rejection of historical context as something that matters for current application. If a phrase is deemed useful as an ideological mantra, then no one wants to know where it came from or how closely the new usage resembles the original. If one wants to rid the world of the scourge of religion in the quest for some global atheist Utopia, then “secular” makes a great mantra, especially when combined with the words “education” and “free”. It doesn’t matter that the drafters of Victoria’s model for state education had neither faith nor ‘un-faith’ in mind when they envisioned a system “free and secular”. What matters rather is the usefulness of “secularism” to the cause of messianic atheism. Atheism per se is politically naked; secularism, which essentially means plain boring impartiality, provides it a fine respectable suit of clothes to wear to the public square.
Nor is the religion in schools “debate” the only context in which today’s beloved sloganeering style of journalism puts a damper on intelligent dialogue about religion. The phrase that’s really had the fourth estate all agog in the past decade is “separation of church and state”. It’s become as irresistible to crusading social commentators as a solitary bush dunny to a swarm of blowflies. It’s so exquisitely utilitarian to the pursuit of blessedly God-free public discourse. Pertinent facts include: (1) that no such phrase appears in the Australian Constitution which in fact protects religious expression;1 and (2) that it’s US origins have to do with keeping the government and any religious group organically distinct from eachother, particularly in contrast with the British model of an ‘established’ church. None of this is any challenge at all, however, to members of today’s commentariat for whom the only history that isn’t all ‘crap’ anyway is the convenient kind.
The socio-political landscape of today’s Australia is perhaps more complex than it has ever been, and this will hardly diminish with time. In the interests of harmony and cohesion, we all need and deserve the kind of public discourse that arises more naturally from even-handed research and careful scrutiny, than from two-second quotes and endless tweets. Only then can we have public dialogue with substance. Let’s have the real debate we need about religion in schools specifically, and public institutions generally.
One thing’s for sure. When words like “preacher” start to be applied to the Grade 1 religious education class at the local primary school, it’s time we all asked questions.
- The Constitution enshrines a “principle of state neutrality” as distinct from “separation of church and state”. Reference: Ch 5 § 116 The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_church_and_state#Australia
Published today at onlineopinion.com.au
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