Gentle reader, it is good to be back in your embrace. I have missed our moments together.
Perhaps, like me, the turbulent surf of life's currents has taken you away from your usual haunts, has tossed you, battered you a little and left you feeling a little bruised and thirsty. Perhaps you too find yourself wondering how the hours in each day have evaporated until it is nearly the end of another month. Those beautiful liquid hours that can be honeyed when we listen to wonderful music and watch clouds, or that can vanish in moments when a print deadline is looming over our hastily re-written copy and an image that just doesn't "pop". Perhaps you too have wondered why feeling busy can be such a burden when we love our friends, and love our social encounters and meals and movies but somehow come up for air each morning a little breathless, a little more wound up.
I have.
I have wondered long into the nights, and early in the mornings, and sometimes woken stunned and confused on the couch and sometimes thrashed into the early dawn entirely failing to sleep. This month I have consciously practised drawing long deep breaths into my belly to flush out the rush. It is starting to help. I have been silent, as you well know. Lost in oceans too wide to see across. I have been functional, my sister had her first child - a girl - and I have ferried food and nappies and messages. And I have been useless and angry, an empty woman wondering if there's reason to persevere. Here again and curiosity re-sparked for living inspired by Buckminster Fuller who decided that he had died and would see what came of things now that the pressure was off.
Tomorrow is the eve of the Christ's birth and a marker in my year towards the fabulous invigorating ritual of death and rebirth on the 31st and 1st. Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I've had some time off and am thinking of you with love and joy in my heart.
I wish you a healthful, inspirational celebration of your own spiritual/intellectual persuasion over the next week and that twenty ten brings you a stream of infinite bounty.
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Monday, May 04, 2009
Not What it Seems
Since the Enlightenment our western culture has revered the advances and solutions that science has delivered. It is one of those fields of human endeavour of which we are very proud.
After all, We fought our way up from thinking that all flesh contains the maggots that may crawl out of it from death and that the entire firmament spins about us, the magical centre of the universe to a much more detailed, specific, understood and known set of laws and reasons and consequences. We can make a machine and send it to another planet via a complex set of other machines and operate it from here for years of reseach and images. We can measure things so small that they become unpredictable in their behaviour and so discover another realm of knowledge enticing us forwards, we can split the centre of an atom and power a city with it. In short, we have become wizards. But just like Bod, we also call up things we cannot control.
We introduce Cane Toads to deal with a moth they don't eat, we have no way of dealing with the waste outcomes of splitting atoms, we can clone sheep, but we aren't really sure why we might do that. So we have Wizard Watchers, people versed in the lore of science, and ready to protect the interests of the greater good of humans. We call them ethicists. We trust that they are at the front lines, balancing our powers with our responsibilities, weighing the possible good with the largely unknown dangers, calling upon the broader communities for discussion, awareness, support and concensus.
Oh wait, I obviously strayed into science fiction there for a moment. When was the last time you heard an appeal from an ethicist for debate? Actually can you name an ethicist? Um .... Peter Singer? Is he? Does he count? I don't know.
What I do know, is that when I read a news article this morning about a court granting permission to a 17 year old to remove his breasts after having been on a gender-reassignment hormone treatment since the age of 13 everything seemed to be in order until I came across this quote from the ethicist (I excerpt here from the article, my emphasis added):
'But ethicist Nick Tonti-Filippini said mainstream medicine did not recognise hormone treatments and surgery as treatment for gender dysphoria. He said it was a psychiatric disorder qualifying under American guidelines as a psychosis because "it's a belief out of accordance with reality".
"What you are trying to do is make a biological reality correspond to that false belief." he said.'
Well that set off my "danger danger" antenna. My understanding is that psychosis is an extreme level of measure, a non-functional state of mental operation. A level, let us remember for a moment, that was applied in the not-too-distant-past to creative types ( NZ author) and women not deemed suitably compliant or docile by their husbands and used as an excuse for labotomies, elcetric shock torture and extreme confinement. But also, and perhaps more importantly, the way this has been formulated as being abberant in relation to an objective "reality".
So apparently, whenever any of us have an idea or a wish to use our will to make reality different, we're possibly just plan psychotic. A line like this is inviting criticism of everything from hair dye, tattoos, and dressing in BSG costume through to going to university and even the entire field of science itself. Where does Mr Tonti-Filippini intend to draw the line?
What a double whammy. I presumed that if ethicists exist, they would be humanists. It seems this has been naive. It seems also, that Mr Tonti-Filippini would find many of my behaviours and desires to defy existing reality as being aberrant enough to justify the label psychotic and so deprive me of my capacity to contribute to the human endeavour of growth and expansion (in ways that do not simply involve the multiplication of our number) and nested inside that issue is his presumption of an objective "reality". In the words of Dylan Moran, "Why does no one say, let's be realistic, oil me ?" Why is reality presumed to be locked in, ordered, un-changeable?
It is easy enough to discover that much as Alex in the court case identifies as "he", our ethicist actually identifies himself as "Dr Tonti-Filippini, Catholic bio-ethicist". Ahh. A little bit more detail gives a lot more context to that right-wing quote. Of all the versions of this news story promulgated across the various news sites of the interwebs, no one bothered to do any more than repeat the copy and the flaws of the first story filed.
Proving in the end that judges in courts can still make thoughtful, humanist decisions, but we only hear about them through the irritating whine of bigots masquerading as informed specialists and the haze of lazy journalism. We, in the form of science have created from our own efforts amazing tools, but we clog their workings ourselves.
I welcome our robot overlords.
After all, We fought our way up from thinking that all flesh contains the maggots that may crawl out of it from death and that the entire firmament spins about us, the magical centre of the universe to a much more detailed, specific, understood and known set of laws and reasons and consequences. We can make a machine and send it to another planet via a complex set of other machines and operate it from here for years of reseach and images. We can measure things so small that they become unpredictable in their behaviour and so discover another realm of knowledge enticing us forwards, we can split the centre of an atom and power a city with it. In short, we have become wizards. But just like Bod, we also call up things we cannot control.
We introduce Cane Toads to deal with a moth they don't eat, we have no way of dealing with the waste outcomes of splitting atoms, we can clone sheep, but we aren't really sure why we might do that. So we have Wizard Watchers, people versed in the lore of science, and ready to protect the interests of the greater good of humans. We call them ethicists. We trust that they are at the front lines, balancing our powers with our responsibilities, weighing the possible good with the largely unknown dangers, calling upon the broader communities for discussion, awareness, support and concensus.
Oh wait, I obviously strayed into science fiction there for a moment. When was the last time you heard an appeal from an ethicist for debate? Actually can you name an ethicist? Um .... Peter Singer? Is he? Does he count? I don't know.
What I do know, is that when I read a news article this morning about a court granting permission to a 17 year old to remove his breasts after having been on a gender-reassignment hormone treatment since the age of 13 everything seemed to be in order until I came across this quote from the ethicist (I excerpt here from the article, my emphasis added):
'But ethicist Nick Tonti-Filippini said mainstream medicine did not recognise hormone treatments and surgery as treatment for gender dysphoria. He said it was a psychiatric disorder qualifying under American guidelines as a psychosis because "it's a belief out of accordance with reality".
"What you are trying to do is make a biological reality correspond to that false belief." he said.'
Well that set off my "danger danger" antenna. My understanding is that psychosis is an extreme level of measure, a non-functional state of mental operation. A level, let us remember for a moment, that was applied in the not-too-distant-past to creative types ( NZ author) and women not deemed suitably compliant or docile by their husbands and used as an excuse for labotomies, elcetric shock torture and extreme confinement. But also, and perhaps more importantly, the way this has been formulated as being abberant in relation to an objective "reality".
So apparently, whenever any of us have an idea or a wish to use our will to make reality different, we're possibly just plan psychotic. A line like this is inviting criticism of everything from hair dye, tattoos, and dressing in BSG costume through to going to university and even the entire field of science itself. Where does Mr Tonti-Filippini intend to draw the line?
What a double whammy. I presumed that if ethicists exist, they would be humanists. It seems this has been naive. It seems also, that Mr Tonti-Filippini would find many of my behaviours and desires to defy existing reality as being aberrant enough to justify the label psychotic and so deprive me of my capacity to contribute to the human endeavour of growth and expansion (in ways that do not simply involve the multiplication of our number) and nested inside that issue is his presumption of an objective "reality". In the words of Dylan Moran, "Why does no one say, let's be realistic, oil me ?" Why is reality presumed to be locked in, ordered, un-changeable?
It is easy enough to discover that much as Alex in the court case identifies as "he", our ethicist actually identifies himself as "Dr Tonti-Filippini, Catholic bio-ethicist". Ahh. A little bit more detail gives a lot more context to that right-wing quote. Of all the versions of this news story promulgated across the various news sites of the interwebs, no one bothered to do any more than repeat the copy and the flaws of the first story filed.
Proving in the end that judges in courts can still make thoughtful, humanist decisions, but we only hear about them through the irritating whine of bigots masquerading as informed specialists and the haze of lazy journalism. We, in the form of science have created from our own efforts amazing tools, but we clog their workings ourselves.
I welcome our robot overlords.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Ramble from Singlets to Kashmir
Another "you know you're a Queenslander when" moment over the long weekend - I packed for 2 days/nights away and arrived to discover the following:
* Shirts = 3 x Bonds singlets (albeit different colours)
* Shorts = cut off trackies
* Shoes = thongs only
and although it was rainy when I packed ....
* Sunscreen, hat and sunglasses - but no umbrella.
Hi-Larious.
So here we are in April (bloody-near over actually) and there's nothing to explain the thundering lack of output/blogging/writing/inspired living from me.
I've been thinking a lot, but that doesn't really translate well to paper when I put it like that. The stuff I've been thinking about has lead to the odd catchy little brain-burp, but I'm quite keen at putting something a little more substantive than a burp together. Of course, that leads to the cycle of producing nothing at all. *sigh* But I will prevail! Even if I do so in a singlet top and cut-off tracky daks. You love me for my wit and vim (thankfully. If you love me at all of course) and not for my sartorial tastes which were never strong have waned and died a wilted death here in sub-tropical land.
Today I wrote a post card to Aunt in NZ and talked to a man who is passionate about building a bakery in an African village. I have been curious about this "let's help the Africans" approach to helping people and I feel a bit uncomfortable that we prefer to help those who are far away, and possibly a lot easier to patronise. So I asked Renee, who is both a church person and an African helper, and she said that her church goes to Africa to build orphanages and wells and so on because people to help are easier to find and accept the help. Huh. I hadn't thought of that part. Apparently the food baskets for poor folk were rejected by local persons of need simply because they came from a Church group (she's some kind of Uniting Church type denomination- not a weirdo/full-on-cult. Although I know that for some readers *any* Christian is cult-y enough). So folks, if you're wondering which charity to support here in Australia - go with the Smith Family - we're much more of a secular country than the media and pollies like to admit.
I don't know how I got onto a religious thing... oh yeah, Easter and crucifixion (My 13 year old Niece said "What's crucifixion?" wish I'd been able to get to that age without knowing that!) so Compass had the British theologian Robert Beckford on (in the last of the 2 part doco called "The Hidden Story of Jesus") following many things including the trail of the (heretical!) Gospels of Thomas and the just-so-crazy-it-might-work story (that pisses everybody off) that the big J didn't die on the cross but scarpered to Kashmir where he preached on, married and had a family and eventually was buried. Hi-Larious! I love that. Particularly the tiny little old guy with a bazillion pieces of paper and clues that point to it being true, but neither church wants it to be true, so very inconvenient!
Turns out I really like British theologian Robert Beckford. (Not to be confused with Michael Beckwith. Who, you-know, is also ok, but slightly too Hollywood for my tastes) He's not afraid to keep it all mixed up. More chaos, that's what we need, more chaos in good ways, and the thing with chaos is that it is very likely that you can't tell what's good and what's not for a long time after.
Except for Alan Moore, he's good right now.
* Shirts = 3 x Bonds singlets (albeit different colours)
* Shorts = cut off trackies
* Shoes = thongs only
and although it was rainy when I packed ....
* Sunscreen, hat and sunglasses - but no umbrella.
Hi-Larious.
So here we are in April (bloody-near over actually) and there's nothing to explain the thundering lack of output/blogging/writing/inspired living from me.
I've been thinking a lot, but that doesn't really translate well to paper when I put it like that. The stuff I've been thinking about has lead to the odd catchy little brain-burp, but I'm quite keen at putting something a little more substantive than a burp together. Of course, that leads to the cycle of producing nothing at all. *sigh* But I will prevail! Even if I do so in a singlet top and cut-off tracky daks. You love me for my wit and vim (thankfully. If you love me at all of course) and not for my sartorial tastes which were never strong have waned and died a wilted death here in sub-tropical land.
Today I wrote a post card to Aunt in NZ and talked to a man who is passionate about building a bakery in an African village. I have been curious about this "let's help the Africans" approach to helping people and I feel a bit uncomfortable that we prefer to help those who are far away, and possibly a lot easier to patronise. So I asked Renee, who is both a church person and an African helper, and she said that her church goes to Africa to build orphanages and wells and so on because people to help are easier to find and accept the help. Huh. I hadn't thought of that part. Apparently the food baskets for poor folk were rejected by local persons of need simply because they came from a Church group (she's some kind of Uniting Church type denomination- not a weirdo/full-on-cult. Although I know that for some readers *any* Christian is cult-y enough). So folks, if you're wondering which charity to support here in Australia - go with the Smith Family - we're much more of a secular country than the media and pollies like to admit.
I don't know how I got onto a religious thing... oh yeah, Easter and crucifixion (My 13 year old Niece said "What's crucifixion?" wish I'd been able to get to that age without knowing that!) so Compass had the British theologian Robert Beckford on (in the last of the 2 part doco called "The Hidden Story of Jesus") following many things including the trail of the (heretical!) Gospels of Thomas and the just-so-crazy-it-might-work story (that pisses everybody off) that the big J didn't die on the cross but scarpered to Kashmir where he preached on, married and had a family and eventually was buried. Hi-Larious! I love that. Particularly the tiny little old guy with a bazillion pieces of paper and clues that point to it being true, but neither church wants it to be true, so very inconvenient!
Turns out I really like British theologian Robert Beckford. (Not to be confused with Michael Beckwith. Who, you-know, is also ok, but slightly too Hollywood for my tastes) He's not afraid to keep it all mixed up. More chaos, that's what we need, more chaos in good ways, and the thing with chaos is that it is very likely that you can't tell what's good and what's not for a long time after.
Except for Alan Moore, he's good right now.
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