...The real deception, then, was allowing him to believe that his situation vis-a-vis spiders was somehow improved -- a deception on which the entire exchange was predicated and that did not change when I dispatched the "real" spider. My assigned role was not really that of spider-killer but reality-buffer. I was allowed (called, really) to step in and protect my son from the crushing reality that our house is, most likely, crawling with spiders. As an adult, I recognize this but don't think about it overmuch, not to mention I happen to find the spiders a welcome alternative to whatever insect population the spiders are keeping at bay. As an 8-year-old, he just needed know that the damn thing was gone so he could sleep.

As parents, we act as buffers all the time. "Life is not fair; get used to it" is a frequent refrain at our house, but even so we're not prepared to catalog all of the precise ways in which life fails to be fair. We absorb what we think they're not ready for and dole it out in manageable chunks. This only goes so far: I am leery of the insipid Veggie Tales ethics in which doing the right thing always works and always feels good. We couldn't quite bring ourselves to convince our children that a real man in a real sleigh was really delivering presents on Christmas Eve (which does not stop us from enjoying this cultural mythology in other ways, or from furtively putting presents out that night ourselves).

But buffers we are. If you're a parent, there's a line somewhere that marks the boundary of your willingness to essentially lie to your children, to offer them a picture that is rosier on some level than you perceive it to be. You do this because you love them and don't think they're ready for what you know, or what you've seen. Your line may be different than mine but I'd bet real money it exists.... Read on at Unorthodxology >>>>

On a Sunday where our theme is to look at our place as people in The Big Picture of all that is, we will begin worship with the singing of Be Thou My Vision… using the words as in Together in Song 547

This prayer will follow. It is designed to speak to the traditional faith, but with encouragement to look beyond, and with encouragement for those who struggle with the traditional language of church... Read on >>>>

This is the kind of insight of which the Sarah Palins of the world are sublimely unaware. From the perspective of Paul Griffiths perhaps she is a "hobbyist-cheerleader" before being a Christian.

ABC Religion and Ethics website: IMPOTENT RELIGIONS AND THE VIOLENCE OF THE STATE By Paul Griffiths

...with the birth of the modern nation-state ... [there was]... the  determination that religious convictions and passions should in one way or another be both distinguished from and subordinated to political convictions and passions. This was attempted in a number of different ways....

First, there was the idea that a particular state, a particular geographically-bounded and law-governed entity, should permit full citizenship to only some religious convictions.

This was the solution adopted eventually by the English and the Swiss. John Calvin's Geneva forms something like an ideal example of this solution, yielding the convenient slogan, cuius regio eius religio, which is to say, your place determines your religion. If you live in Geneva, you're a Calvinist - if you live in London, you're an Anglican.

A second mode of distinction and subordination was the American solution, according to which the polity's laws are supposed to provide a palatable home for those of many different religious convictions - just so long, of course, as they each recognize their subordination to the laws of the state...

This solution tolerates all religions except the intolerable ones that won't submit to the required distinction and subordination. Against those, the army is sent in or the coercive power of the courts and the police used.

There is a third solution as well, it may be called the French solution. I'd prefer to call it the American solution with the gloves off. According to this solution, there is no need to identify one religion as the preferred one (as the English did), neither is there any need to discriminate tolerable from intolerable religions in order to provide a safe haven for the latter (as America did).

No, the best thing to do is declare them all intolerable, and to the extent possible eradicate their presence and their trace from the life of the body politic, whether by violence or expulsion.

All three solutions share two basic assumptions. The first is that loyalty to the state must be primary and loyalty to your religion, if any, always secondary. The second is that your religion can be separated from your politics. Religion is thereby made into a lifestyle choice - subordinate to and under the control of the state... Read on >>>>

We should love each other. It's the ultimate “motherhood” statement of the church. Families should especially love each other. That does not need biblical support, chapter and verse, because it is a given, a with-mother's-milk learning that we simply assume.

If we are listening when we read this week's text, we find our deepest motherhood assumptions are under attack.

Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.

There is an instant need to spiritualise, allegorise, or as Loader says, domesticate this statement. Love one another has become such a mantra, that unless we are careful and deliberate, our domestication of today's text will be almost unconscious.... Read on >>>>

"I am an atheist with an affinity for non-fundamentalist religious believers whose faith has made room for secular knowledge. I am also a political liberal. I am not, however, a multiculturalist who believes that all cultures and religions are equally worthy of respect. … I cannot accept a multiculturalism that tends to excuse, under the rubric of “tolerance,” religious and cultural practices that violate universal human rights." ...

The context in which I read this is one of disappointment and alarm. In the recent federal election in Australia, members of both major parties propagated essentially racist, anti refugee rhetoric... Read on >>>>

ABC Religion and Ethics: CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS AND THE MYTH OF RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE By William Cavanaugh

The myth of religious violence helps create a blind spot about secular violence. A sound approach to the study of violence would be resolutely empirical, investigating the conditions under which any kinds of ideologies and institutions produce violence - not just jihad and the sacrificial atonement of Christ, but also the "invisible hand" of the market and the belief that liberalism and secularism are the destiny of the whole world....

What counts as religion and what does not depends on how power is configured in any given society, including our own. The idea that "religion" is susceptible to violence, in ways that "secular" ideologies are not, authorizes certain kinds of power....

The myth of religious violence is a way of saying, "Their violence is essentially irrational and fanatical. Our violence is essentially rational and necessary."... Read on >>>>

On the nature of "religious" vs "secular" see the following from the same web site

"Religion," in its modern sense, is a modern invention. It came into being sometime in the seventeenth century, roughly around the time of the Peace of Westphalia in the 1640s and 50s.

Its birth was therefore contemporary with the birth of the modern nation-state - something which, like religion, was a new thing in the world. And this connection is not accidental....

The circumstances in question were the violent divisions that had ravaged Europe for the century or so preceding the Peace of Westphalia, divisions that had severely damaged the infrastructure and the political peace of the European continent.

This violence used to go under the name "the wars of religion," but it would be better called the birth-pangs of the nation - not those of any particular nation, but those of the very idea of the nation.

Certainly this violence included the killing of men by other men in the name of God. But more profound than that was the violence involved in the effort to figure out what it would mean to found and order a state in which citizens with vastly different convictions about what human beings are and how they flourish could live together under a single system of law without killing one another or becoming convinced of the necessity of revolution.

And so there was the decision that some sets of convictions about human nature and human flourishing would be called "religious" and others "political," though without any very clear idea, then or now, of what differentiated the one set from the other.... Read on with Paul Griffiths >>>>

I remember going to visit my 94 year old Grandma.  When we got to the old folks home, Grandma was nowhere to be seen.  It turns out that after breakfast and getting dressed, she used to go off down the corridor and help the old folks.

People like my grandma seem to me to have made a discovery. The have found a contentment which is independent of their status or possessions. Grandma was old, frail, poor as a church mouse.... and happy. She was possessed of a generosity and a freedom of worry about herself.  I don't mean that she had no worries or concerns or struggles, but that she was content.

This is not a thing to be taken lightly. It is not about being old and on a pension and in a good aged care facility. It is not guaranteed.  I have met old folk who were far better off than Grandma, and who were bitter and miserable.

I want to end up something like my Grandma.

What I don't want to do is get to the point... Read on >>>>

Around July 26, which is surprisingly early, I had my first magpie strike of the season. A magpie slammed into my helmet several times out near Mawson Lakes. So out came the cable ties.

Cable ties sticking up out of the helmet prevent the birds from hitting the rider on the head.  They don’t like flying into the little forest of twigs. It’s very effective, although it makes the rider look somewhat strange. A lady once asked me at the traffic lights why I had all this stuff on my head.  I said it was to keep the aliens away, and she took a step back! I then said it was for magpies, but she was not convinced, and looked the other way.... Read on >>>>