Moreton Bay bugs.

On the last day of a trip to Queensland, I saw an ad touting the joy of living in Moreton Bay and concluded that Australian town planning departments either have a work environment that encourages self-actualisation through uncritical tolerance or they are staffed entirely by 14-year-old males. A reasonable deduction when you learn that two suburbs of Moreton Bay are named Humpybong and Woody Point.

Living in Western Australia I’m used to suburbs with double-entendre names: Innaloo, Upper Swan and so on. I’ve grown up with jokes based on such juvenile homonyms: about 20 years ago the R&I Bank changed its name to Bank of Western Australia, which for ease of use was abbreviated to BankWest. Although an obvious choice, whoever came up with it had clearly never heard of Doctor Spooner.

The tag line of the ad for Moreton Bay was “Ready for anything.” If an embarrassing address is the worst that the area has to offer, it’s probably a nice place to visit.

 

‘The DaVinci Code’: for the honour of women.

Shortly after The DaVinci Code was published, at least six books followed that examined many of the novel’s claims, such as the Bible was altered, Emperor Constantine hijacked the Council of Nicea, and DaVinci’s painting of the Last Supper has Mary Magdalene at Jesus’ right side, not the apostle John. By answering these I would just be recreating the wheel. This essay is about one issue that I think has been overlooked; specifically the conflicting ways that The DaVinci Code portrays women.

By reclaiming the power of the sacred feminine, The DaVinci Code asserts that the woman can enable a man to experience the divine, through a ritual that it calls “sacred marriage” (hieros gamos in Greek); more commonly known as “having sex”. At orgasm there is a point at which a man’s mind is cleared of all thought and it is at this point he is opened up to God [1].

 

The ultimate self-help guide: chapter 1

If you’re reading this you do need help at helping yourself. If you didn’t need help, you wouldn’t be reading it would you? Neverthleless, by reading this you’re reinforcing your own helplessness: you’re turning to someone else for help, when you should be relying on your own inner strength. But this book was here, and it was easier to see what someone else says rather than rely on yourself and battle it through on your own.

 

Knowing God’s will for your life.

“God has a plan for your life.” Those who say this mean that God has a specific destiny for you that you must find and fulfil, like Frodo going to destroy the One Ring. Then once this idea has been handed to us we’re left to run with it as well as ask the inevitable questions: how do we discover God’s plan for us? What if we miss it: must we make do with second best? Will that person go to Hell because we didn’t fulfil God’s plan for us?

 

“To violence against women, Australia says ‘No!’”

This is the tag line of a government-sponsored ad shown on TV over the last year or so. Photos of women (actors perhaps) are shown while a (their) voiceover tells their brief story of abuse.

I ask, what about violence to men? It isn’t only women who get abused. And other than the physical and sexual abuse the ad talks about, what about psychological and emotional abuse people can be subjected to? Why isn’t the tag “To violence, Australia says ‘No’”? It’d take too long to run the ads to show men and women, adults and children? So run a few different ads: that’s what they did for this campaign.

 

Colour my world.

What’s the use of learning the languages that the Bible was originally written in: Hebrew and Greek (and about 5 chapters in Aramaic)? You could say that we really don’t need to, for these reasons:

1. With the amount of manuscripts that have been discovered - about 25,000, whole and in part, in the various languages of the ancient world - we now have a highly accurate knowledge of what the original manuscripts said.

2. There is an enormous amount of study and interpretation available, the result of the efforts of tens of thousands of people, past and present, whose work has resulted in commentaries and Bible translations.

 

Temporizing.

Having dinner with friends the other evening, one mentioned that people are generally willing to talk about anything except death. I see three reasons why people don’t want to think about death – and what comes after: because the topic is scary; depressing (“heavy”); or beyond sure knowledge. There is a fourth; we’re immature and don’t appreciate that we, us – Me, myself, personally – will die. But we’re looking here at deliberate excuses, and here is my considered response to the three.