This ones not for Everyone

For the last couple of weeks Ive been struggling with the fact that something I did has resulted in a man going to prison for six years. Also I'm feeling pretty pissed off with everything, and I was thinking about how religion has so much to do with whats so wrong in the world, that Ive decided to write about one of my Topics for the Future - "Being a Jesus Freak".I was amazed to read what Wikipedia had to say on the subject:

"Jesus freak, while initially a pejorative term for those involved in the Jesus movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, was quickly embraced by them and soon broadened to describe a Christian subculture throughout the hippie and back-to-the-land movements that focused on universal love and pacifism, and relished the radical nature of Jesus' message. "

I was amazed because that seemed like quite an accurate summing up of what being a Jesus Freak was all about for me and my friends back then. Particularly the bit about the radical nature of Jesus message, something I took so seriously that I renounced all my worldly ambitions and left school and home on a search for the Truth, a search for God and the Ultimate meaning of existence.

My mother described one of my mentors at the time as "the man who destroyed my son" but at that stage the story was only just beginning. The thing that got me through and stopped me from being destroyed was that more than anything I really wanted to find out "the Truth" about everything. Thats why in the end, though my journey took me deep into fundamentalist christianity, and along some embarrassing detours, in the end I came out the other side, having learned a lot, but most importantly that "The Truth" was definitely not anywhere in that direction. I think its important that I was a radical christian not a moderate one, because , to use a yachting analogy I took my religion out into the deep sea and gave it a thorough testing, whereas the moderates paddle around in the shallows where faith never gets properly tested, and the cracks and faults never get a chance to leak. So I still have a kind of respect for Fundamentalists of any kind because they at least have the courage of their convictions and are prepared to let the radical beliefs of their religion correspond to radical action in their lives. In that, they have integrity.

The problem is that all religious explanations fail, especially once they moving away from a vague sort of mystical view about the human spirit and start filling in details like which kind of animal you can eat and what should be done with the foreskin or facial hair, or womens clothing. The crazy thing is that every religion, every variety and subset and sect of every religion proudly declares that everyone elses silly rules are all wrong but their ones are right. Dont drink that tea! Cover your face! No Blood transfusion! All these ridiculous stories, apalling rules and silly rituals make religion look as if its really about people - and particularly men - controlling other people - particularly women - but also gays and everyone else who's not in the In Crowd- and the reason it looks like that is because thats exactly what it is. No sensible Creator would be bothered with all that nonsense. Or ask us to believe it as a sign of devotion to "It"


So believers lose my respect however in their abandonement of that greater search for Truth, preferring dogma and blind allegiance to one narrow explanation of reality over the continuing quest for knowledge. These are people who are not interested in the Truth but in being right. And they'll argue and even fight and kill to prove it. Hence the mess the world is in today. And its not just war, its the whole failure of much of humankind to turn away from blind faith and look for a greater vision, maybe one with fewer answers but at least more compassion and tolerance and understanding.

But back to the man I sent to Prison for six years. The ironic connection between him and being a jesus freak, is that one of the Big Problems I eventually could not reconcile with christian religion was the problem of sufferring, the Problem of Pain as the CS Lewis' book that I read called it. I'm afraid the scenario I often saw in my mind was an innocent child being abused,raped or sodomised behind closed doors and happening right now - yes actually right now at this very moment as you are reading this, there are countless hundreds, maybe thousands of little girls and boys being abused in this way, raped and abused - and the Christian God supposedly all knowing and powerful watching this horror and doing nothing. I always said that if it was in my power to do something I would, I could not stand by like the christian God who acording to christian apologists is making a stand on some principle of individual liberty and the price of free will and doing nothing - if I had the power I would stop it.



The thing is about a year ago I did exactly that to a man on a Sydney street. He was exposing himself and physically sexually molesting a 5 year old girl and I leaped out of the car and stopped him. I took his wallet off him and dragged him down to a house and called the Police. And he's been behind bars ever since, and was sentenced last month to 6 years. And while Ive been thinking about this whole tragic scenario it occurred to me that the christian god didnt just abandon the little girl - he abandoned that poor damaged abuser, probably also a victim himself. And I also wondered why anyone can believe that god chose not to create a world where such things never happened , where sexual urges were not so violent and difficult to control or subject to corruption, a world where innocent children at least were safe from this ghastly fault in the human makeup. Its not that impossible to imagine we could have been made a little differently- after all humans dont have the ability to hear sounds that dogs can hear, so if hearing could be different why not sexuality? Given the world that we have, one wonders how it can be that people believe not only that the christian god chose to create it that way, but that god is a good one.


So what are the answers? I'm still looking and wondering...

Update

Update 1: Congratulations to the fabulous All Blacks and Richie McCaw who must be NZ Man of the Year. The decider last Saturday night was nail biting stuff, and a great win - the Tri Nations for the fourth year in a row and the Bledisloe for Five in a row.

Update 2: The unvaccinated baby remains unvaccinated, now a month old and the parents arent in hiding any more. They had a celebratory lunch the other day, the father quoted as saying the Doctors concern for the baby was "just garbage", and the Herald headline was "Vaccine Victory for Rebel Parents with a Cause" A spokeswoman for the Australian Vaccination Network - an extremist antivaccination lobby group - Meryl Dorey said the case was "a sign that justice can win out" The final outcome will not be known for a few years of course - I just hope the crazy gamble these people have taken with the life of their child doesnt go pear shaped and the kid die with liver failure - if it did you wouldnt hear about it from the Australian Vaccination Network and Spokeswoman Meryl Dorey, but shouldnt they be held accountable in some way?

Update 3: Tim Johnston the Firrepower conman has stayed well away from Australia. Apparently he's in London trying to set himself up doing what he knows best : ripping gullible people off.

Update 4: Tony Wood the antidrugs campaigner who was going to stand in the Local Council elections that were held last weekend, has disappeared without trace. His name was not on the Ballot paper for Warringah Council, and I cant find any further references to him in the Press. Maybe he pulled out once he realised his single issue campaign was never going to get off the ground. But there has been so much in the news about the war on drugs all round the world about police and soldiers killing and being killed, about the massive amount of money being spent on this futile endeavour which could be eliminated almost overnight if we just let adults be free to make whatever choices they wanted to about such things. Yep, heaps of them would make dumb choices but then thats what growing up is all about. Society would mature and get over it eventually, but it never will this way.

Update 5: The Bali Bombers have not been executed yet, but there was an item in the paper the other day saying they had said their last farewells to their families and the end was near....

Update 6: I am still going to Post on Global Warming.Its a HUGE issue...watch this space Folks.

The Event of the Century

I've been trying to decide what was the most significant event on planet earth in the last 100 years. I'll explain why later. Anyway firstly I looked up Time Magazine because every year they nominate a person or idea which "for better or worse has most influenced events in the preceeding year", and found results of a Poll they took in 2000 on the "Event of the Century" . And Elvis got the most votes! Really!

Fortunately the Time Editors werent quite as shallow as the rest of the USA. They decided that in a century dominated by Science, the Person of the Century must be the pre-eminent Scientist, the man whose work gave rise to the Atom Bomb, the Big Bang, E=MC2,quantum physics and electronics, the really huge stuff in science : Albert Einstein. Just about everything else that happened, from the moon Landing - which was runner up in the Poll - or the discovery of Penicillin, or Television,the jet engine and airtravel,transistors and computers and the internet were all ultimately dependent on that great explosion of scientific discovery and endeavour. Lots of people thought Hitler should have been the man of the Century but the consensus was that time would steadily diminish the impact of his monstrous lifes work, whereas Einsteins would remain for ever.

There were heaps of other incredible things that happened that century : the civil rights movements, world war one and gas warfare, world war two and the Holocaust, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Idi Amin, Mahatma Ghandi, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, helicopters,the Beatles,the Cold War, the Korean War, Vietnam and Agent Orange, Fidel Castro, the rise and fall of communism, JFK, discovery of the coelacanth,heart transplantation, the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,insulin,Watson and Crick discovering the Double helix structure of DNA, discovery of Blood Groups, the immune system and antibodies, Teflon,plate tectonics,the Polio vaccine, the erradication of smallpox,the invention of nylon and PVC plastic, AIDS,radiocarbon dating, Bob Dylan,the Rolling Stones, Madonna,Woodstock, drugs for leukemia and schizophrenia,the Human Genome,lasers,Nelson Mandela,mobile phones, personal computers....on and on it goes.Has there ever been a greater century?

And for me personally,the most important thing that happened exactly one hundered years ago, while all this was waiting to happen, was that in Scotland my Dad was born on 9th September 1908.

Three things I wasnt going to Buy

Leaf Blowers, car GPS navigation systems and widescreen TV's - to me these were commodities that were made before there was a market for them and then the advertising agencies and glossy mags got going and created a demand, which in all cases has taken off. So now everyone has one. Or is being persuaded to get one for fathers day.

But me ? Well I heroically get out the old Broom (remember those quaint old fashioned cheap sort of stick thing with a whole lot of hairy stuff at one end - and much bigger than a tooth brush - ) and would labour away on the drive and turning circle in front of the garage, get rid of all the eucalypt leaves and sticks that blow in constantly and have a very nice clean drive at the end of it. And then I could go round all the verandahs and do the same. Good exercise, great to be out in the fresh air, didnt wake up the neighbourhood or pollute the atmosphere...yup,environmentally PC. And then Sue just went and got one, which I refused to use of course, noisy petrol powered plastic and junk metal chinese thing. Except that one day I really needed to clean up the drive in a huge hurry and I used it. And in five minutes I had cleaned the entire drive, the turning circle, the verandahs and the cobwebs, the detritus and half rotted litter clagging up the garden, the old hedge clippings and dried duck poo, and it all looked fantastic!

As for the widescreen TV well we already had three old TVs that worked. Admittedly the one we usually watched responded only intermittently to the remote - yes Ive used the remote for years but there was a time...- and for a second or two every few minutes the sound would stop but we hardly ever watch TV anyway. So Sue went and got a widescreen TV - shes great like that, very pragmatic. And now I watch TV like I used to watch TV when it first came in, in the 60"s, just to watch it and to marvel at the crystal clarity of the images and the sound, the realistic life-like colour, the feeling that you really are looking at reality rather than at a TV image, .....

And as for the In Car Navigation systems, whats wrong with the old "Gregory"s" - the inch and a half thick Aussie softcover road atlas book that everyone has in their car glove box? Most of us only ever drive to and from work, or the same shops or the same relations and friends, the same Pub and footy ground and only rarely ever venture out into new territory - and we always got by with the Road Signs, the Gregorys and the occasionaal winding-down-of-the-window-and asking-a-chap-walking-along-the-street-how-to-get-to-wherever.

It wasnt important that the chap usually didnt know where it was either, or if he did the instructions were too confusing and you got lost again and had to ask someone else. The point was you're out there, its one of lifes challenges and you're using your brain for once to work it out, youre meeting people and interacting with them, and at the end you get that huge proud sense of achievement when you finally arrive. Who cares if the wedding is already over?

No way am I ever getting one.

Parents on the Run

Last week the parents of a newborn baby boy were told that if they took him out of hospital without getting the vaccination against Hepatitis B the Government would take the child away from them. So they left the hospital and went into hiding, saying they believed that aluminium in the vaccine was more dangerous than the disease. Welfare workers couldnt find them, so the saga then became even more "David and Goliath" when the Supreme Court of Australia issued an injunction requiring the parents to get the vacination done, but they still refused. Today the Government has given up because there's no point in giving the vaccine once the babys five days old. So I daresay tonight the antivaccination lobby are rejoicing that they outsmarted Big Brother.

I wonder what the little boy will be thinking? We know for certain that without his vaccination he has an almost 50/50 chance of becoming a chronic carrier of hepatitis, and if he does, a 30% chance of getting cirrhosis of the liver or liver cancer and dying from it before he's an adult. In other words at least 1 chance in 8 of a miserable debilitating existence that will end in death from liver failure before he's an adult. And the benefit of not being exposed to aluminium in a vaccine? Well the antivaccination lobby propose all sorts of dire effects of aluminium from alzheimers disease to autism, but there is absolutely zero credible scientific evidence to back up their claims. In any case, Autism is really rare - 1:1000 - and is not lethal, so why on earth would you prefer a 1:8 chance of death from cancer at a young age, over a 1:1000 chance of Autism or Alzheimers in 60 or 70 years? So is this a case of child abuse? Or do the rights of parents overrule the rights of their children ?

This really just highlights the completely confused and unbalanced approach these people have about vaccination. I dont think anyone doubts that on a very rare occasion a vaccination can produce serious side effects. But even Penicillin can be fatal to the rare individual with an extreme hypersensitivity, yet no one disputes that it has saved literally millions of lives in the last 80 years and is right near the top on the Top Ten List of Greatest Discoveries of All Time. And no-one would dispute the possibility that on a rare occasion, someone might have survived a road smash if they hadnt been using a seatbelt. But the balance of benefit versus risk greatly favours our continuing to use penicillin and seat belts, and the same is true of vaccines. Only a conspiracy theorist could deny this.

Biomagnetic Therapy

If you saw the ad that I saw on TV the other day you would swear that what they were selling was a magnetic device that would give you incredible relief from chronic pain. The device was an amazing underlay containing hundreds of magnets that you put on your bed. The underlay can be wool or cotton and is available in a variety of sizes, and you can also get a pillow. "How amazing" I thought and decided to check out the website. On their slick website the same impression is created but look again : when you read the actual words, there is not a single statement that is anything like a direct assertion that this product actually does anything at all. Its a masterful example of how advertising can be designed to create an impression - you know the old classic blond bombshell draped over say an outboard motor! - suck you in, relieve you of your cash and then be able to deny any liability for the product turning out to be useless. The Website has the personal story from "chronic pain to welcome relief thanks to Biomagnetic therapy"of Craig Trinder, an Australian Champion Motorcyclist who, when you read the story closely, is actually the owner of the company. "Welcome relief" - OK so what exactly is that? It doesnt even dare say pain relief but links the two ideas together in your mind. Now, he may indeed have had miraculous and welcome relief - of whatever - using biomagnetic therapy, and then decided to make a business out of promoting it, but on the other hand you would have to say theres a clear conflict of interest involved and you might expect him to talk it up. Actually when you look a bit further, you discover that he certainly had been talking it up, so much in fact that Biomagnetic Therapy and Craig Trinder were investigated by the ACCC - the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, a government agency whose function is to monitor commercial activity and try to protect consumers from being ripped off. Heres a bit of their report:"Biomagnetic Therapy and Craig Trinder have admitted that prior to 2002 some of the claims made in regard to their therapeutic magnetic products may have been, or had the potential to be, false, misleading or deceptive, in contravention of sections 52, 53(c), and 53(g) of the Act although they have advised it was never their intention to do so."
I thought it was nice of the ACCC to include that bit about "it was never their intention to do so" "Yeah right" was my thought! Later in their judgement they extracted the following undertaking:

"Biomagnetic Therapy and Craig Trinder will not make any claims regarding therapeutic magnetic products unless they are able to demonstrate that there are reasonable grounds for making the representation, for example, reliable scientific evidence. '

Of course none of this necessarily means that Biomagnetic Therapy doesnt work. But when theyve been ordered not to make claims unless they can back them up, and they then dont make any but just use advertising tricks to create impressions in the minds of vulnerable people with chronic pain, it makes me wonder.