• A life saved, a friendship born – Features – Dominion Post
  Pregnant with her second child, unable to swim, and with no lifeboats anywhere near the Wahine’s listing hull, the 23-year-old was forced to trust her daughter to a stranger. So she turned to Brian Papesch, 21, and asked him to take Joanne.
  (tags: story personal)
• Mere Comments: The new-minted skeptic
  O possessor of much-better-than-average intelligence: pull down some Barth or Kierkegaard or Thomas Aquinas or Chesterton or Pelikan or Guardini or Tournier or Seraphim Rose or Calvin or Tozer or Reardon or Luther or Pascal or Wojtyla or Lewis. It would s
  (tags: error skool)
• New Zealand Conservative: Naked News [Satire]
  I wonder if the feminists ever anticipated that their efforts to liberate their breasts would fuel the urges of silly young women to flaunt themselves? Thanks to the syphilitic Labour party for making it cool to be a whore.
  (tags: sex society)

• Not PC: ‘Storm on the Sea of Galilee’ – Rembrandt
  Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633) is a genuine masterpiece, and a thrilling use of light and shade and the drama of the storm. This is, or should be, the sort of standard against which tremendous art is judged.
  (tags: spirit inspiration beauty)
• History of Civilisation
  A brief look at the history of civilisation, these trends have heralded either a) revival of traditional faith and values; or b) total disintegration/breakdown of the society, which is then replaced by a more vigorous, confident people group
  (tags: society)

• No Minister: demise of the Pavlova Paradise
  If Kiwis can no longer have their quarter-acre bit of paradise, then what is the point of New Zealand?
  (tags: economy equality prosperity)

1. The Press: Perspectives: What history tells us about Jesus

   [another one by Ross McKerras] “The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.” So said Edward Gibbon. Nevertheless it is a worthwhile exercise to ask “history” what kind of certainty we can have about the events of Jesus’

   to jesus gospel bible 

2. Stimulus Journal « Why is Lloyd Geering still important?

   [Geering's ideas] continue to have considerable influence in the media, in academia, and in government circles (including education). That influence is inevitably secularist, working from within Geering’s overarching modernist paradigm, rooted in the Eu
   to atheism error 

3. NZ Herald Politics: Roger Douglas: Hard right? No, they’re hard left

   One expects Helen Clark or Michael Cullen to describe conventional economic thinking as irrelevant “hard right” ideology. That sort of deception is their stock-in-trade.
   to economy equality 

Easter is the right moment to examine Christianity or the belief systems our lives are based on, writes Ross McKerras
[From The Press, Perspectives page, Thursday March 20, 2008 -- typed in manually because it's not online, but it should be!]

“The Resurrection of Christ is the most notorious and monstrous Imposture, that ever was put upon mankind.” When Thomas Woolston fired this shot in1727 the attack on Christianity was well and truly under way. Exact casualty figures are still being counted, but one thing can be said: it was surely good enough to clear out no man’s land. Either the resurrection of Christ really happened, and the consequences are huge; or it didn’t happen, and the consequences are huge. You can’t loiter somewhere in the middle.

“Then I’m with Woolston”, many modern Kiwis will say. “People might have believed this sort of thing in a pre-scientific age, but not today”. But what really is different about today? Just because people happened to live 2000 years ago doesn’t mean they were stupid. They knew just as well as we do that dead people don’t come back to life, even better than we do perhaps, since they had first-hand experience all the time of dealing with their sick and dead. They had no specialist facilities such as hospitals to do it for them.

In fact, the real reasons many people today don’t believe in God and in miracles often have little to do with modern scientific knowledge. First, let’s accept, for the purposes of the argument anyway, that God exists, and that he may sometimes intervenein the world to do something special.

The next step is to agree that the gospels are correct in at least the essentials of what they say. Refusal to grant this assumption is to subscribe to a level of skepticism that will have to call into question an awful lot of history as we know it (and unquestioningly accept it), for example the basic facts about the lives of any of the Caesars.

Next, the alternatives: Jesus came back to life, or he didn’t. Or maybe he didn’t die, but only became unconscious and later staggered out of his tomb? Come on, these are not Asterix’s Romans. You don’t rule the known world by being soft or stupid. Maybe Jesus’ disciples stole his body and hid it somewhere? To do that they needed to be brave and resourceful, smart and quick-thinking. By the honest portrait the gospels give, they fail on all these counts. The ruling elite had several compelling reasons to find the body, and plenty of time to do so, but they didn’t. Besides, the disciples staked their lives on the truth of their claim.

Or, just maybe … Jesus really died, and God brought him back to life.

Granted the assumptions, the evidence looks pretty good. In the end, though, we have to acknowledge that there is no final proof or disproof in such matters. It comes down to a judgment call. We can choose to believe in God, and that he resurrected Jesus, or not.

It is important at this stage to expose the widespread fallacy that people who are “religious” base their lives on faith, while everyone else has certainty. The fact of the matter is that we all have to choose which road we will put our faith and our feet on; none of us can see what’s at the end of our road. Even science is in the same position, despite Richard Dawkins’ assertions. Much of modern science is based on assumptions that test out insofar as we can test them, but they cannot be proved. Progress can only be made when they are simply assumed true.

The theory of special relativity is based on the assumption that the speed of light is a constant. General relativity starts with the assumption that gravitational mass is identical to inertial mass (something that bothered Newton, who spent a long time devising experiments to see if it was so).

The method of beginning from assumptions, called axioms, and then constructing a body of knowledge with logical, watertight proofs was introduced at the dawn of modern science by Euclid. But then in 1931 Kurt Gödel showed that, even granted the most carefully selected set of axioms, you still can’t prove everything.

So it is in life. On the night before Socrates died, one of his friends summed up his teaching like this: “…it is very difficult if not impossible in this life to achieve certainty… at the same time it is utterly feeble not to use every effort in testing the available theories… it is our duty to do one of two things: either to ascertain the facts, whether by seeking or by personal discovery; or, if this is impossible, to select the best and most dependable theory which human intelligence can supply, and use it as a raft to ride the seas of life — that is, assuming that we cannot make our journey with greater confidence and security by the surer means of a divine revelation”

You may believe that the Bible is a divine revelation; or you may think it is a “monstrous Imposture”. For Euclid and Einstein, choosing the right axioms was critical. But many people today have not stopped to examine either the claims of Christianity or the belief system their lives are at present based on. Surely each of us has an obligation to ourselves, if no-one else, to do so.

• Ross McKerras is a Bible translator from Christchurch

• Challenge Weekly: February 11th 2008
  [Select committee ignores victims]: Gambling does funny things to democracy [Casual childbearing]: call for removal of incentives [Should churches be taxed?]: Listener disdains good works and beneficial social outcomes, prefers hostile ideology
  (tags: gospel society)
• koantum matters: Antihumanism, or Why the secular fundamentalists have got it all wrong
  It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonise religion.
  (tags: atheism dawkins error faith)
• One Cosmos: Cosmic Forces and Terrestrial Farces
  A mind parasite is essentially an internalized lie that takes on a pseudo-life of its own. It’s as smart as you are. It justifies itself, grows, and infects the psyche. Those who are in thrall to the lie are by definition *slaves*
  (tags: mind cosmos evil)

A Donkey’s View has been reading The Language of God by Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome project. He claims that

Collins is another of the compromisers, keen to make the Bible palatable to the scientifically-minded atheists, agnostics, or almost Christians. They all give up too much. A key question to ask when reading compromise books is, “Was the Genesis flood global”? If it was not, according to them, their whole position is biblically untenable. And what do they think of the order of creation in Chapters One and Two? Evolution would change the order. Collins is a theistic evolutionist.Christians should be fully conversant with the book of Genesis, as with other books. Upon Genesis rests everything. If you are unconvinced about Genesis, you are heading towards spiritual and perhaps moral and social disaster. Really.

My response:

On what grounds do you presume your literalist interpretation of Genesis to be infallible? I submit to you that many bible colleges (eg BCNZ) allow for a lot of latitude, rather than certitude when interpreting these myth-cloaked passages.

Remember that any reader approaches the text with a full complement of cultural, linguistic, conceptual baggage, and facile readings are not sufficient especially for such fundamental passages.

Truth must be consistent: the Bible story, if true, must cohere with the physical evidence. If there appears a contradiction, it is a valid procedure to question *all* our assumptions, and not be dogmatic.

I think that Theistic Evolution (and Intelligent Design, hopefully) largely succeed in that worthy goal [seeking the truth, and reconciling scripture and science]. Unfortunately Frances Collins is caught between two vehement cultural polemics, and is rejected by both religionists AND materialists.

As I have said before: Truth is much more than ink on paper. God inspired the Book, but we don’t worship a book, we worship the Creator! To understand the world around you, study the actual world. You may find His fingerprints there.

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.

And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.

- – William Blake

Voltaire and Rousseau, the heroes of the Enlightenment mock the sacred. However, the poet sees also in the mundane the potential for sacralization. The atoms of Democritus and Newton’s particles of light are the most elevated grasp of reality that science offers us. (One can also add to these examples more modern ones.) These theories are the sand on the shores of the Red Sea where the miracle of the Exodus from Egypt occurred and because of this miracle the material also became sacred. In the second stanza Blake yet gives free rein to his naïve feelings of revenge: The wind that blows back the sand to those who throw it causes the mocking Eye to go blind. But it is possible to explain the line thus: the blindness of the mocking eye is the elimination of partial sight that creates the mockery. From here on there will be a comprehensive vision that will see how the mundane is part of the sacred because each particle of sand reflects the sacred beams Divine. It is surprising how much this poem expresses the spirit of the religious philosophy of R. Abraham Isaac Kook (1860-1935) and his disciples. One should add that in Hebrew, the word mundane or secular is a homonym with the word for sand.

“Easter Song” was a two minute number that became an anthem of the Jesus movement. Written by Annie Herring in 1972, “Easter Song” was one of those that “just came out,” Annie recalls. “At first, I didn’t think it was much of a song. I loved it, but I didn’t think it was a song for us. I thought it was a choir song. I even said to the Lord, ‘Oh Father, that sounds like a song that a lot of people should sing.’ But with a drum beat and electric organ, Easter Song became the signature tune of the band “2nd Chapter of Acts“. When the band began singing, audiences would grow strangely silent. Some time later, someone approached Annie and said, “We’re really sorry we didn’t applaud — but we’ve never heard music like that before!” Many others expressed that they had never before experienced worship so keenly.

Easter Song

Hear the bells ringing, They’re singing that we can be born again
Hear the bells ringing, They’re singing, “Christ is risen from the dead!”

The angel upon the tombstone said, “He has risen, just as he said.
“Quickly now, go tell his disciples that Jesus Christ is no longer dead!”

Joy to the world! He has risen, Hallelujah! He’s risen, hallelujah! He’s risen, hallelujah!

Youtube: Easter Song performed by The 2nd Chapter of Acts, Phil Keaggy, and “A Band Called David”, in the summer of 1977