Becrux

While interpretations of God may diverge to the point of ambiguity between interpretations - evidently - I think that there are some things need to be stated in a straight forward way.

Exploring and discussing the nature of the ambiguity between interpretations, and suggesting a framework within which those varying perspectives make sense and are understandable to each other, is a valid form of theology and ultimately helps to strengthen the faith, whether through being rigorously affirmed or refuted in part or in toto. The nature of God is a topic of interest, among others, addressed in places such as the Book of Job for one example. The arguments can stand on their own and if they have validity that validity would have preceded this feeble attempt to express those ideas, and the arguments are likely to be elaborated in the future into a more acceptable and digestible form. As novel ideas they are poorly expressed and incomplete but none the less I feel it my duty to try to express the spark of those ideas until at least I can see that the new perspective has been understood. Whether people like it, approve of it or find the new perspective a threat is not my concern. My concern is to try to express and convey this new perspective until I know it has been appropriately understood. That is why I have persisted. I consider it a legitimate form of commentary on the Bible and it is done in good faith.

We are living in times where there is a lot of confusion and uncertainty with regard to the Judeo-Christian faiths. There is the issue of the relation between religion and politics, or church and state and the relation between public and private, science and faith. The energy crisis and geopolitical conflicts that include the modern state of Israel have contributed to this general anxiety of the times. The Anglican Church is possibly on the cusp of a split due to the issue of sexuality. There has also been a decline in membership of the traditional churches while younger people are flocking to new evangelical churches. Fundamentalism is a now major problem for all the religions of the book. Things are in a great deal of flux at the moment.

Apart from religion, these blogs have also tried to elaborate on how and why liberal democracy works as a political system. The key word there is system. Elections alone don’t make a democracy, as is obvious from the recent events in Zimbabwe.

With regard to energy systems these blogs have looked at very general strategies for building sustainable and renewable energy systems. These ideas are very general to the point of being generic. There are also some posts about novel strategies for space travel. All of these things need to be researched and evaluated to see if they could be implemented. That you can’t buy them off the counter at the moment is not an argument that they are ideas that will not work. I was hoping that Australian businesses could work on some of these energy system topics and provide Australians with jobs inplementing some of the viable strategies, but it seems that the mining boom has captured all the public attention and imagination. Nuclear power is on the agenda again… need more be said. Anyway, the ideas that will prove profitable will be developed overseas even while Australians are left standing there with coal dust faces, kicking the dirt. Australia was given this opportunity on a platter, and what did they do with it? In the past we exported wool and imported clothes. Now we export hydrocarbons and iron ore and import cars and tvs. Funny that, the problem of a balance of trade.

• Read More »

One of the consequences for accepting that there are two versions of Creation in the first chapters of Genesis is that there might also be a couple of classes of interpretations that may appear ambiguous or even contradictory when they are placed side by side and compared. Even while the two viewpoints talk about God, and the same God at that, the two interpretations understand God differently. But even these two viewpoints can be part of the whole; the conflict between these two viewpoints could be seen as a theme for the Bible from beginning to end. Both perspectives have their own boundaries of what is acceptable, but these two sets of boundaries do not match with the other, and there are even situations where what is right from one perspective is wrong from the other and visa versa.

The perspective that places an emphasis on the first version of Creation in the first week, so to speak, stems from a systemic approach while the perspective that emphasises the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve takes a more personal and tribal approach based around social power. Even the vision of God in the Garden of Eden differs depending of which of these perspectives is taken, and the meanings of the Fall and expulsion from the Garden of Eden differ as well. On the one hand knowledge that the original equality between men and women has been broken leads to a loss of that initial innocence, and an awakening to reality out of fairyland Eden. On the other hand God’s directive has been broken and a punishment of expulsion is imposed, also a possible indication of the way social reality and power can work. And then it just keeps going on from there. The tribal power based version is the conventional understanding. Both versions work although usually only one or the other is asserted as true.

What if highlighting this conflict in perspectives were one of the (perhaps hidden) themes of the Bible?

Again, my argument is for the principle of the separation of church and state in modern states. Mixing church and state within a modern state, such as what happened with fascist states and communist states and various other smaller dysfunctional totalitarian regimes, is akin to reverting to a state of formless chaos before the differentiations of Creation. Liberal democracy works as a system in a modern state, so that individuals and cultural and religious groups are free and independent to the extent that they want to be.

The ambiguity may be in the interpretations rather than in the text, and discussing the two versions of Creation can bring that ambiguity to the fore. This does not devalue the Bible at all. It still serves, even as the times are changing. It is also a valid response to the modern challenge of fundamentalism. (And while they may be loath to accept it now, this new perspective actually gives them what they are looking for.)

***

2 June

At first blush you might disagree with the idea that you could fault state communism for breaching the principle of the separation of church and state, for the simple fact that state communism tried to ban churches and religious freedoms in general. That a communist state act against religious and cultural groups within its borders is a prime example of a breach of the separation of church and state. Ideology became a creed.

Some far right fascist states during the first half of the twentieth century consciously tried to imbue their nationalism with a kind of religiousity. Perhaps a sense of rivalry, jealousy even given the near farcial creation myths that fascists dreamt up during that time, might have partly driven the hatred behind the Holocaust. After some adequate amount of time historians may well look back at the twentieth century and see it in ways we are not even conscious of now. It may be still too raw an issue to speak about at this time and a comment like the one above may well be considered controversial. There is also a danger in one-dimensional misrepresentations in that it can divert awareness away from the real nature of the problem, perhaps until it is too late. People need some kind of community, society and cultural groups to belong to and that need can not be simply reasoned away. It will be filled with something or another. Preferably civic nationalism in a liberal democracy rather than a kind of primordial or ethnic nationalism.

• Read More »

…and last week I even bought an iPod…

• Read More »

Seabed sequestration of CO2 is another quick fix, silly idea. Imagine the effect of a volcano and lava flows at the bottom of the ocean where a huge amount of CO2 is being stored under pressure as a liquid. It could pump years worth of CO2 gas straight into the atmosphere at a rate much faster than we could possibly deal with. New Zealand and Indonesia are within the Ring of Fire around the Pacific Ocean. All this for once off profits to flog some brown coal. And to think of the expense that they would want the taxpayers to foot to set the rigs up.

• Read More »

• Read More »

Hunger is a major motivator. The French Revolution was in part a riot brought on by a scarcity of food. The most memorable quote is that from the spoilt Queen to a hungry crowd yelling for bread. If it’s bread that they want then let them eat cake. Wrong answer. The ruling authorities tried only a few years before the revolution to gauge public opinion by letting people register their complaints and ideas, and this was met with mostly mundane responses. Hunger is indeed a major motivator.

We are starting to see food riots due to a global shortage of food and with market mechanisms pushing the price for staple foods up. Global warming and the implemented responses to global warming thus far are major causes for this food shortage.

In a previous post I argued that the so-called war on terror is partly about trying to manage resource scarcity globally so that in effect walls can be put up to maintain affluence and keep the poor out. This is not at all a situation analogous to the Berlin Wall during the Cold War. It is more like setting up delineated concentrated areas in-situ to divide the wealthy from the poor. In some places the wealthy live in walled suburbs and in other areas the poor are confined within a restricted region, as with Gaza. There is a far right feel to this kind of territorial approach. It also presumes a zero-sum situation with regard to resources and which judges human society, ingenuity and innovation as being little more than damp dust.

The proponents of the so-called war on terror acknowledge that there needs to be more than just a military response to terrorism and the threat of terrorism. They readily admit that development and being able to feed populations is important for success. Military power is sometimes contrasted with what is sometimes called soft power, or economic and social power. The use of international sanctions against particular nations is an example. There is also the notion that compliance results with economic rewards. Power whether it is explicit through military force or implicit through economic sanctions is coercive. The ideas of freedom, liberty or human dignity have no place in this scheme.

There is a third aspect that needs attention for there to be a genuine peace. There needs to be public forums where disputes can be debated and decided upon depending on the merits of the case, or the honest results in a general election, and so on.

The problem is that command and control systems of governance can not solve complex problems. Command and control systems can work well with small teams and only when the people agree to work in a disciplined way together and only on specific goals. Command and control systems of governance can not handle limits. The rules change when limits are approached. There is nothing magical about it. The speed of light is a limit in physics. Absolute zero is another limit. Quantum physics deals with limits with regard to size and motion, energy and time, and so on. Understanding what happens at the limits gives us a better understanding of the physical process even under what we consider to be normal conditions.

Macro effects can sometimes take precedence over micro effects and that is what command and control systems can not handle. Market mechanisms are a macro way for dealing with scarce resources, to provide just one example. Higher prices for scarce resources drives some people to try to meet those needs in innovative ways. Pushing on with a command and control mindset when confronted with a limit is likely to result in failure and a waste of effort. Global warming presents us all with a limit with regard to using fossil fuels. This should be basic knowledge.

One recent problem that has made things worse with regard to global warming as well as a global food shortage are biofuels. From a command and control perspective biofuels might have looked like a solution to global warming and a reduction in oil reserves. The resulting food shortage might have been unforeseen. But it has been a series of political decisions that in effect has been to insist on maintaining a command and control attitude to energy that has made the problem worse. A macro approach that places a cap on CO2 emissions and trades those permits creates a market that will favour innovative solutions to transport and energy needs without creating the wastes. The macro approach will work. The problem is the INSISTENCE of the political class to command and control energy systems globally. Claiming that they will provide security of oil resources, at over $100 per barrel, while stalling the uptake of genuine solar alternatives that could bring the cost of energy down with scale is like serving us all dainty little slices of energy cake while we starve. It is not what we want or need. Only an open public realm and all the rest of the liberal democratic bundle can deal with these problems in an effective way.

Anyway the main point I wanted to make is that to deal effectively with terrorism requires three things working together. You need the physical security, you need the economy working as it should in a modern society, and thirdly you need an open liberal democracy where assumptions can be tested and disputes can be settled without resorting to violence, no matter whether that violence is hard edged or soft. Eventually the emphasis would ideally turn towards liberal democracy at the macro scale and personal work or living conditions at the micro scale. The command and control approach is not suitable, and peace is not a situation of submission to violence. Soft power is not better than hard edged power - it is doubly violent in pretending to be non-violent and then also blaming the victim. It can be extremely vicious.

And finally about brown coal. So you can process it to remove water and other things. So what. How much more energy has to go into that coal to process it before it is burnt. It is about margins of usable energy. If a large percentage of the energy in the coal is used to condition the coal before it is burnt in a power station it leaves less useful energy over. Basic. So when demand for coal is increasing, this method would compound the amount of coal needed to fill the growing need for energy. It might make for good short term sales but it would be a disaster in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, and for Australia’s economy when the rest of the world decides to clamp down on excessive sources of this pollution. At one stage experts need to sit down and do a decent cost and benefit analysis for coal. Using fossil fuels to meet energy needs is a form of freeloading. Fossil fuels may have been necessary for the industrial revolution and to meet energy needs during the twentieth century, but they are no longer suitable for the twenty first century.

A post at Pharoz from 09/08/2006 Ethanol

***

11 May

This post was written and posted before any knowledge about Cyclone Nargis. I am horrified like most other people in the world about the human tragedy in the wake of the cyclone through Burma.

• Read More »

There is no monopoly on what Christians know as the Holy Spirit, and there are many cultural symbols that point to whatever it happens to be. It is something that can not be captured in concepts and words. There is a sense of truth about it. Perhaps one expression among an infinite number of such expressions that point to it is Tao. To talk about it can sound silly. It can not be monopolised.

• Read More »

This one is a bit cheeky. What New Zealand wants with regard to a head of state if they want to replace the Queen with a local is up to the people of New Zealand. I don’t know about the political system of New Zealand. With this post I am only suggesting a possibility.

When the Australian Commonwealth came into existence on the first of January 1901 the new entity was a federation of a number of British colonies. The sixth Covering Clause of the Constitution also listed the colony of New Zealand as a possible state for the Commonwealth of Australia although they decided not to opt in. The state of Western Australia only made it into the Commonwealth at the last moment (and talk of succession from the Commonwealth is still aired in WA on occasion).

This post follows on from some of the previous posts about submissions to the 2020 Summit about Copernican republic models. One submission by H.K.Farmer (number 7265 of the Governance Topic) suggested including New Zealand in a council for a rotating head of state. Rather than summarising the relevant posts links to the previous posts are provided below:

Copernican Model Overview

Nominations and elections for an Aussie head of state

Copernican Republic in 2020 Summit Submissions

This post is about the effect that the inclusion of New Zealand might have on perceptions of a rotation of elected Australian State and New Zealand representatives to act as our collective head of state. The inclusion of New Zealand in such a council would make Australians seriously consider limiting the powers of such a head of state.

I presume that most of us want a non-executive and apolitical head of state, but we also want to elect the people into that office. There will always be a confusion in the public mind about electing a head of state due to the powers that an elected President of the United States has in the USA. The powers of a US President are more like the powers of a powerful European monarch of a couple of centuries ago. We would prefer to model our head of state on the powers and role of the contemporary constitutional monarchy. The Queen is expected to act on the advice of the elected Prime Minister only and to play a symbolic and ceremonial role.

The idea is to rotate the position of head of state around a council of elected representatives from all the Australian states, the Australian territories combined and New Zealand. The idea of a rotating head of state imitates the political system of the Swiss Confederation to some extent. The benefit for New Zealand is that they would have a unique elected representative to represent New Zealand right throughout the cycle and who would also represent Australia as well as New Zealand for one year of the cycle, as the designated head of state for the ANZAC council.

While the political systems of both Australia and New Zealand will maintain their integrity and the respective Prime Ministers will continue to exercise their political power within their respective nations, such a council might also give us a presence on the world stage as a regional body. The benefit for Australia is that such a council would also, paradoxically, create some distance between the head of state and the Australian people because of the inclusion of New Zealand. This is another buffer against a potential demagogue being elected and politically exploiting the position of head of state through populism. Australians might consider giving our head of state executive powers if they were always a popularly elected Australian, but if for one out of eight years there were to be a New Zealander as our head of state then Aussies might think twice about giving that office extra political powers. That is a comment about the dangers of nationalistic parochialism within Australia, not about Kiwis. We love Kiwis.

This idea will be controversial. I know that it can take a long time for new ideas to percolate through to the political class and the wider population. It might also be good to leave this idea as a possibility for the moment. I think it would be beneficial if we were to keep this option open for the future, so that if Australians and New Zealanders ever decided that we would do better in the world together and we both voted an approval for some kind of union across the Tasman then such an ANZAC council with a rotating head of state might be a way to do that.

• Read More »

Another idea for the use of gyroscopes where a force can be exerted through the gimbals against the angular momentum vector is as a powered joint between a couple of solid beams. The flywheels could be used to apply forces between the two beams so as to change the angle between them. The gyroscopic frames for the flywheels would give the beams the ability to move with three degrees of freedom, basically the two beams could move around the joint in all directions, but the force derived from the flywheel would depend on the direction of the angular momentum vector in relation to the angles of the beams were to each other. So for such a joint between two beams you would need to be able to quickly slow down and then speed up the rotation of the flywheel so that it could be slowed down so it could be oriented correctly before being wound up and used to apply a force between the two beams. A simpler design would give the two beams only one degree of freedom while having the orientation of the flywheel fixed for a particular joint, so it could act in a similar way as a knee or elbow joint.

If satellites had some way to significantly propel themselves in space and change direction then you could consider the use of catapults from low earth orbit to send them off to roughly where you would want them to be. It’s not a very precise way to send a satellite into its orbit, but if the final adjustments to the orbit can be made by the satellite itself then using a catapult in space may be an effective and cheap way to deploy large numbers of satellites, such as solar collector satellites.

One idea for a catapult is to use a number of beams powered with these flywheel joints to fling satellites with something like a whip-like motion. If you had a large number of the beams connected with flywheel joints and all moving in the same plane then a pulse through those beams, similar to cracking a whip, could catapult a satellite at the end of the train quite significantly. Even the cowboy set might find space a fun place to be.

It’s something you would easily understand if you saw such a thing in action. When it is described in a few paragraphs as it is here it may not make much sense. The idea here is that you might be able to push against gyroscopic flywheels, as with the ideas in some previous posts, to do work in other ways. They might be used to power changes in angles between pairs of beams in a way analogous to how muscles power changes around an elbow joint, for example. I realise that at first this idea may sound a bit weird.

Another idea is to use these things like ropes in space with the difference that you could tether a couple of space craft to each other with these things in such a way that forces could be applied through these ropes to keep the spacecraft a safe distance from each other. You might even use them as a first soft tactile contact between spacecraft for when they are docking. These extendable robotic arms or ropes/chains could softly attach the two spacecraft into a system and then forces could be applied through these ropes to draw them together safely for docking. As the extendable distance is narrowed the [rope/chain/extendable arm/whatever you want to call them] could be folded together in a compact way. It would work for as long as energy and contoling information could be sent through all the beams and gyroscopic joints containing the flywheels. They could have a large number of nodes and ideally they would be designed to be modular so that these extendable arms could be assembled to cover a long distance if need be. You would also expect the beams between the joints to be strong but light weight and for there to be the possibility to lock joints at whatever angle they happen to be.

The idea is quite simple - you use flywheels in the weightless environment of space to move multistage robotic arms around. The energy is taken from the flywheels in the same way that you use a change of the direction in the angular momentum of the front wheel of a motorcycle to change direction of the motorcycle when that motorcycle is moving. Yes it would be complex to manage and yes you could only do so with a computer controller.

• Read More »

So the republic is back on the agenda. I don’t know how you could claim to have a discussion about the republic and then a vote on the topic, even if it is a non-binding plebiscite, and not discuss models for the republic. Voting for a vague republic without reference to models in such a plebiscite would be like signing a blank cheque.

In quite a number of ways this two stage strategy is highly risky. Personally, I think a better way to approach the issue is through a discussion of models and then try to get a decent model passed through a referendum, once there is wide public support for that model. I suspect that this second attempt has been well planned. Perhaps the way I have been treated over the last few years might have been motivated partly so as to make sure that I can not realistically participate in this public debate about a republic when the topic reemerges. Anyway, I think the momentum is set to build for this blank cheque republic. The model for a republic is something about which it is important to get right. Unfortunately, it may be third time lucky for a republic.

• Read More »