It was inevitable. Sooner or later a boat filled with desperate people would set out from India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, whatever, for New Zealand. We have been “protected” to date only by an accident of geography–New Zealand’s relative distance. Australia has faced the problem for decades. A group of Sri Lankan poor (allegedly Tamils previously […]
Entries Tagged as 'Social Commentary'
Klingon Cloaking Devices Unmasked by Boat People
July 15th, 2011 15 Comments
Tags: Human Rights · Rights and Freedoms · Sri Lankan Boat People
Macsyna King, Representative of the Coming Race
July 8th, 2011 13 Comments
We are simple souls, and so find ourselves “conflicted” (to use pop psych jargon) over the public vituperate venting about one Macsyna King. How we love a mob. All heat and no light. A dirty bomb. Macsyna is coming out of the closet via a book, Breaking Silence: The Kahui Case, written by Ian Wishart. The mob […]
Tags: Chris and Cru Kahui · Due Process · Ian Wishart · Investigate Magazine · Macsyna King · Welfare
Easy Dupes: Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari “Gay Girl in Damascus”
July 3rd, 2011 7 Comments
Narratives are powerful. They control what we identify as significant data or facts, how we empirically apprehend the data, what interpretations and shades of significance we place upon the evidence, and the conclusions drawn. Absolute objectivity is impossible. Only relative neutrality and disinterestedness are possible. The cut of our jib determines the winds we catch […]
Tags: Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari · Gay Girl in Damascus · Homosexual Conduct · Islam · Israel · Palestine · Paula Brooks · Syria · Tom MacMaster
No Special Rights, So . . . One Law for All
May 9th, 2011 4 Comments
We remain militantly critical of contemporary Maori ideology. We believe it excuses personal and family accountability by resorting to the fallacy of historical determinism: Maori, their leadership tells them, are victims of predatory exploitation by European or imperial powers; the significant cause of social and cultural and spiritual degradation amongst Maori stems from the unjust […]
Tags: Justice · Māori Land · Restitution · Te Urewera National Park · Tuhoe
Contra Mundum: Stoning Adulterers
May 2nd, 2011 92 Comments
Back in 2005 there was a minor furore when Labour MP Ashraf Choudhary stated he agreed with the Koran’s teaching that people who engaged in homosexual conduct or who committed adultery should be stoned to death. In the media spiral that followed, some commentators pointed out that it was not just Islam that held this […]
Tags: Adultery · Ashraf Choudhary · Capital Punishment · Contra Mundum · Gordon Wenham · Investigate Magazine · J J Finkelstein · John Goldingay · Old Testament Ethics · Raymond Westbrook · Walter Kaiser
Aslan is Not a Tame Lion: The Christchurch Earthquake Beyond Our Questions
April 16th, 2011 14 Comments
In the aftermath of the second Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand, “official” Christian spokesmen were exercised to assure people that God, the Living God, had nothing to do with earthquakes. They defalcated. Their theodicy was that their god was absent. In the face of likely outrage, church officials revealed that they worship, in fact, the […]
Tags: Aslan · Chris Trotter · Christchurch Earthquake · Problem of Evil
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
Contra Mundum: Pacifism and Just Wars
July 5th, 2011 27 Comments
Comedian Bill Maher recently berated Christians for being hypocrites for supporting military action against terrorists in his “New Rules” segment on the U.S. TV show Real Time (transcript here). Jesus, Maher contended, was a pacifist; “Jesus lays on that hippie stuff pretty thick. He has lines like, “do not repay evil with evil,” and “do […]
Tags: Bill Maher · Contra Mundum · Investigate Magazine · Just War · Pacifism · War Ethics