Chew the Fat

There was an outcry from many in the Christian scene over how the secular media portrayed events surrounding the civil union bill last year. People were angry and disillusioned with the media. Fair enough. It was pretty bad. However there is a lot of hypocrisy here.

I have finally found the place where Fox News gets its inspiration. It is called Christian World News, on our very own Shine TV. (Channel 99, on your sky remote).

It is the most biased news I have ever seen on television. Obviously it is news from a Christian perspective, which already raises a few questions. However, some of the things that were being reported were down right wrong and deceptive.

The headline article was on the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert's, trip to the USA.

I am not going to get into the Israeli/Palestinian debate. I am not qualified and I have never been there. However I do know blatantly bias journalism. The only people who were interviewed were Israelis. They had an expert, David Rubin an Orthodox Jew who left America to live in an Israeli settlement in the territories of the West Bank, who quoted Old Testament verses on how the land of Israel is given by God to the Israelis and it is their right to control and kill for it.

Of course these experts have their opinions and that is fine with me. But if the fourth estate is to be respected then it must be unpartisan no matter what the individual or group opinion is. Otherwise it is not journalism it is commentary. Christian World News does not portray itself as commentary, and that is deceptive and unethical.

There was not one interview with a Palestinian academic. In fact there was no mention at all of the Palestinian perspective at all. The only mention of Palestinians was when the expert called them the enemy and used Old Testament verses to back up his thoughts.

They had images of Palestinian terrorists with balaclavas and rockets. They had images of Israeli children playing at school.

They went on to talk about the evacuation of Israelis from areas in the West Bank. The expert read a verse from the Old Testament stating that Israel should never be divided. They then said that the evacuation had made no difference to the tensions and therefore should not have been done.

David Rubin: The Almighty made it very clear -- throughout the Bible -- that the land of Israel is being given to the people of Israel as an eternal inheritance. It says very clearly in the book of Joshua, “…everywhere that the soles of your feet shall tread, I am giving unto you.” And it says in Genesis 12 that “those who bless Israel will be blessed and those who curse Israel will be cursed. And all the people of the world will be blessed who bless Israel.”

Wendy Griffith (Journalist??!!): Doesn’t the Bible also say, “Woe unto those who would divide My land?”

David Rubin: That’s right. And, President Bush should be thinking about that and all the members of Congress should be thinking about that, and Condoleezza Rice should be thinking about that when they are pressuring Israel to withdraw from the land of Israel.

The Journalist did not ask one probing question. The images were completely one sided.

There are atrocities on both sides, but you would not have known it that from this story. The emmy award winning doco,‘A death in Gaza’ demonstrates what Palestinian children have suffered. The director was going to make another on the Israeli children but he was killed before he could begin.

How can these people gain any respect when they appear so blatantly closed minded and partisan? It frustrates me.
It also asks a very important question. Is religious based journalism even possible?

Once again there has been another insurgent/freedom fighter/resistance attack upon troops in Iraq. It is a horrible situation for all involved.

The world renowned and controversial journalist Robert Fisk came to Wellington a few months ago. He told us that he spent a day with the Iraqi police in Baghdad; they were friendly and very open. Throughout the day they told him how much they hated the American and British troops. By the end of the day Robert realised that these young men were Iraqi Police by day and ‘insurgents’ by night. “We will get the Americans out Mr Fisk!”

I have to admit if there were foreign troops in my country, marching through my streets, setting up check points in my community, pointing guns at me and my loved ones, imposing curfews and smashing down my door to check for whatever they like, there is no doubt in my mind that I would join a resistance. I would hate them and want them out, especially if they had bought nothing but chaos and civil war.

On the flipside, if I were a troop in this place, trying to help the people and keep myself alive at the same time. Yet I don’t know who is my friend or foe, if they want to shake my hand or take my life, I would be confused, disgruntled and dangerous.

Then who is to blame for this? As a young confused poet caught in the madness of world war one, Wilfred Owen asked the same question.

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said,
My Father,Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not they hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.Behold!
Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Psychics are popping up on every channel. I must admit it is really convincing. Sensing Murder is the latest show. They use psychics to get answers to unsolved murders. Often they come up with answers that the Police have overlooked. Private detectives check out the psychic claims and they are always right.

There is a psychic show on TV right now and the guy is so accurate it’s uncanny. He knows names, dates, secrets, everything. I don’t know if there is heaps of editing which makes him seem a whole lot more sharp than he is. I guess one could never tell until they are in the situation.

They even have interviews a few days later with the person and they say things like “I didn’t know what he meant by this statement but then I talked to my sister and she reminded me of something that I had forgotten.”

Most people say psychics are so general that they could be talking to anybody and just reading their body language and working off their answers. I say if you think that, you have never seen a real psychic at work.

Many Christians would state that it is not the relative communicating with them but it is a demon fooling them.

I have no idea.

I do have a couple of questions though. A medium spends so much time talking to dead people but not once have I ever heard them ask questions that we all want to know, like what is the meaning of life? Which religion is true? Is Hitler in hell? Do you eat? Do you go to a ghost KFC? Do you have to worry about ghost cholesterol?

One thing I do know the answer to is pets. Today on the show the guy said to the lady “Your dog chippie is here with your husband”. But this only raises more questions.
Is there such thing as ghost dog shit?

"I believe it to be a great mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense in it....We cannot blink at the fact that gentle Jesus meek and mild was so stiff in his opinions and so inflammatory in his language that he was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbeted as a firebrand and a public danger. Whatever his peace was, it was not the peace of an amiable indifference." --Dorothy Sayers

After spending sometime link jumping from blog-site to blog-site I have realised that the vast majority of sites are nothing more than a space for intellectual masturbation.

Everybody is a master philosopher with great big words and circular riddles. Everybody knows how to debunk religions they are not into with clever loop holes and contradictions. Everybody is a political genius who slams their opponents laughable policies. Everybody who writes is right, their opinions have never before been discovered, and all who read these apples have, as Oprah says, an Ah Ha moment, and the world shifts.

A blog site reflects on nothing other than the person who writes them. Who writes a blog anyway? A grandiose scheme to show the world how insanely clever I am and how no one has looked at the world like me before. I am clearly the next Da Vinci and this site will keep a record of my drawing board.

Of course this is all a bit of an oxymoron, but hopefully my writing about blogs will reveal the depth of my talent of introspection and inspire the world to take a good hard look at itself. I believe this one will stop war in Iraq.

The vast majority of sites, including this one, are nothing more than a space for intellectual masturbation, but then again what the hell else are we supposed to do on here?

I was recently sent this email by a friend. I have checked it out and it is all true and correct. For more information check:
http://www.miningwatch.ca/index.php?/104/Pascua_Lama_Background


Dear friends who care about our earth.
Judge for yourself if you want to take action. In the Valle de San Felix, the purest water in Chile runs from 2 rivers, fed by 2 glaciers. Water is a most precious resource, and wars will be fought for it. Indigenous farmers use the water, there is no unemployment, and they provide the second largest source of income for the area.

Under the glaciers has been found a huge deposit of gold, silver and other minerals. To get at these, it would be necessary to break, to destroy the glaciers - something never conceived of in the history of the world - and to make 2 huge holes, each as big as a whole mountain, one for extraction and one for the mine's rubbish tip. The project is called PASCUA LAMA. The company is called Barrick Gold.

The operation is planned by a multi-national company, one of whose members is George Bush Senior. The Chilean Government has approved the project to start this year, 2006. The only reason it hasn't started yet is because the farmers have got a temporary stay of execution.

If they destroy the glaciers, they will not just destroy the source of especially pure water, but they will permanently contaminate the 2 rivers so they will never again be fit for human or animal consumption because of the use of cyanide and sulphuric acid in the extraction process. Every last gram of gold will go abroad to the multinational company and not one will be left with the people whose land it is.

They will only be left with the poisoned water and the resulting illnesses. The farmers have been fighting a long time for their land, but have been forbidden to make a TV appeal by a ban from the Ministry of the Interior. Their only hope now of putting brakes on this project is to get help from international justice. The world must know what is happening in Chile. The only place to start changing the world is from here.

We ask you to circulate this message amongst your friends in the following way. Please copy this text, paste it into a new email adding your signature and send it to everyone in your address book. Please, will the 100th person to receive and sign the petition, send it to _noapascualama@yahoo.ca_ to be forwarded to the Chilean Government.

No to Pascua Lama Open-cast mine in the Andean Cordillera on the Chilean-Argentine frontier. We ask the Chilean Government not to authorize the Pascua Lama project to protect the whole of 3 glaciers, the purity of the water of the San Felix Valley and El Transito, the quality of the agricultural land of the regionof Atacama, the quality of life of the Diaguita people and of the whole population of the region.

I just got back from The Da Vinci Code. It was crap. The only saving grace is Ian McKellan.

What I did find interesting was this idea so many have that if you show some kind of blemish, or even cover-up, in the formation of orthodox Christianity, it will ruin the whole thing.

If this whole Jesus blood line were true, most evidence suggests that it is a load of rubbish, would it really make one iota if difference to Christians? Would it, as the movie suggests, ‘Cause the greatest crisis of faith the world has ever seen’? Of course not.
There are many issues of ambiguity about the historical Jesus; there are the gospels, the dates, the epistles, the New Testament Cannon and the creation of orthodox Christianity. These are not hidden, they are public record, yet they barley disturb any from their faith.

Christianity is in itself a living thing, people believe Jesus is the Son of God not only because of what they read in history but because of the things they have seen happen around them when they apply his teachings and try to live what they have read. Most of Christianity is not a faith dependent on relics and intricacies. It is about testimony and a living church, it is about peoples lives being changed by something beyond them, something unexplainable.

I find it interesting that every few years Hollywood will try to cash in on the theme of Church relics and cover-ups. It is portrayed as an issue that could change the world. In my view, all this does is mirror the lack of understanding out there about what Christianity is all about.

If we want to come to satisfying conclusions on the hazy issues within Christianity, such as homosexuality, eternity, sin, etc, the general consensuses is that we must enter into the world of Greek and Hebrew semiotics, i.e. a study into contextual definitions of Greek and Hebrew words and characters. I agree that this is an important task in getting deep with biblical analysis.

However there is vital a step before this which I believe is often ignored. When this step is neglected people often draw faulty conclusions. This step is so often neglected because it questions the very thing many Christians believe is an absolute. That is, testing the reliability of the actual verse or scripture being studied.

If we are to attempt to find the essence of Christianity, we must not only acknowledge but study the circumstances that the cannon which we call the New Testament reached us. We must understand the reasons why various ancient writings were included and excluded in the cannon. We must also be real in studying how reliable and unaltered the cannon books really are.

“Some would point to the discovery, throughout the course of the twentieth century, of ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, hundreds of years older than the manuscripts available to early Bible translators, such as those responsible for the King James Bible. Among other things, these early manuscripts are significant for showing that the books of the New Testament were not copied with the assiduous care you might think or hope for. In fact earliest copyists appear to have been untrained and relatively unsuited to the tasks; they made lots of mistakes, and those mistakes were themselves copied by subsequent copyists (who had only the mistake ridden copies to reproduce…” (B.D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities 2003, Oxford University Press. New York)

Before the gospels, of which there are far more of than the four included in the New Testament cannon, were put down on paper, the stories of Jesus spread via the rich oral traditions of the time. Oral traditions are not known for semiotic accuracy but rather to share the point of a message.
The generally agreed upon dates that the gospels were written are:

Mark: c. 68–73
Matthew: c. 70–100 as the majority view; the minority of conservative scholars argue for a pre-70 date, particularly those that do not accept Mark as the first gospel written.
Luke: c. 80–100, with most arguing for somewhere around 85
John: c. 90–110. The majority view is that it was written in stages, so there was no one date of composition.

“The dominant view today is that Mark is the first Gospel, with Matthew and Luke borrowing passages both from that Gospel and from at least one other common source, lost to history, termed by scholars 'Q' (from German: Quelle, meaning "source"). This view is known as the "Two-Source Hypothesis". The rediscovery of the Gospel of Thomas, a sayings gospel remarkably similar to the form that Q was thought to take, and containing many of the sayings shared only between Matthew and Luke, but in a more raw form, has given a large degree of credence to the hypothesis. Others note that since the Gospel of Thomas is thought to be a later document than the synoptics, Thomas copied from them.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel)

Also, there are some examples of specific texts within the New Testament that scholars believe had been tampered with or added to during copying and translating.

The unreliable and ambiguous history of the New Testament can cause problems when one studies the root Greek meanings of specific English words and draws definite conclusions on morality and boarders within Christianity. I am not saying that understanding the Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic and contextual meanings isn’t an important thing, quite the opposite. Everything to do with the history of the text must be taken into account, including reliability.

I do think that this adds to the argument that no one can ever claim an exclusive knowledge and an authoritative claim to biblical ‘truth’.

I am 27 and have recently got engaged. I think I am a man. But I need to prove it.
I have a really young face.
I bought an instant kiwi ticket last week and was asked for identification. The age restriction for Instant Kiwi tickets is 16. I have never once been able to buy beer without ID. Once I was refused entrance into a pub because the bouncer decided my drivers license was a fake.

Time for a sign of my manliness, a beard.

I am blond so I have to grow it thick to be noticed. I have tried a couple of times but it usually gets to itchy after the first two weeks, and I don’t have the patience to push past the scruffy hobo look. Winter is on the way and the breaded hippy look will be in this year so the timing is pretty good. Marcus lush has a great beard, but he has dark hair. I think the closest beard to me will be Brad Pitt.

When I think about it there are a number of great people with beards:
















































































I also note with great interest the number of problem people that don’t have beards:

The evidence is mounting. My conscience tells me I am doing the right thing.

I also view this decision like a bit of a Sinead O’Conner act. She shaved her head so she would not be viewed as a sex symbol. My beard should do the same. I am engaged now. I should no longer have to put up with the scores of ‘glad eyes’ and wolf whistles I receive on my public expeditions.
Regular facial hair updates will follow.

Feedback has been good. A lot of people are interested not only on what I learn but how I will cope and react to it all. Luckily I am not alone, my close friend and flat mate has decided to join me. It will be great to share the load; we can bounce ideas off each other and go to the meetings and interviews together.

I have a friend who works in community radio in Wellington. They are sorting out a weekly time slot for us to share our adventures on air, and to have talkback and interviews on the religion we are experiencing.

So we are all set to go. I am doing some freelance work in the Waikato for about three weeks. When I get back, at the beginning of June, we will begin it. Here is the order so far:

Scientology
Latter Day Saints
Bahai
Neo paganism (New age)
Jehovah’s Witness
Islam
Hinduism
Atheism
Buddhism
Christianity
Chinese Traditional Religion (Confucianism)
Sikhism
Taoism
Judaism
Rastafarianism

We will go for two weeks. Begin on the Monday and finish on the Sunday night.
If it has been really full on, we will take a week off.

I have a brilliant, and rather thick, history of the world religions. I will use that to get an initial general understanding. From there we will try to meet people and emerse ourselves in it.

If you know of other faiths that you are interested in, maybe we can ad them to the list.

I have had an idea for a few weeks now. I understand that this is big task in every way so I really would appreciate some feed back.

In my life quest to discover God I have discovered more and more that I really do not have much of a clue about the many religions that our world has to offer.

According to the majority of websites I checked out, the 15 main Religions in the world are (in random order):

Christianity
Latter Day Saints
Jehovah’s Witness
Islam
Hinduism
Atheism
Buddhism
Chinese Traditional Religion (Confucianism)
Taoism
Judaism
Sikhism
Scientology
Bahai
Neo paganism (New age)
Rastafarianism

The plan is to spend two weeks immersing my self in each religion.

I will put as much effort as I can in to living that religion. I will read it, think it and follow the customs as best I can. I will attend meetings and try to meet with leaders in that religious group. I will be honest to them about what I am doing and I will be as open as possible teachings and instruction.

I completely acknowledge that I am being arrogant and simplistic in my approach. Most, if not all, religions take many life times to grasp, and some are simply ungraspable. I also realise that within these religions are many branches and parts. I will try to stay to the most common part, and if other issues arise I’ll face them then.

I also admit that I am completely biased, I come from a particular worldview and have grown up with ideologies and philosophies drilled into me from all corners. I had been involved heavily in Christianity for over ten years so I carry a lot of mindsets with me. But I will attempt to be as impartial as I can.

This will not be some lame John Safron Vs God attempt. I will keep cynicism out and keep as open as I can to the experience.

I will share all my experiences on the blogg. I will be as honest and non-judgmental as I can.

I have had a mixed reaction about this from friends. But I would really like to hear other people’s opinions that, like me, have an interest in faith and religions.

Any thoughts would be really appreciated.