“Love Australia or Leave”?

The letters to the editor have been filled, for the last week, with responses to the bumper sticker phrase, "Australia: Love it or Leave". That's a false dichotomy! I'd like to offer a third option, since as an Australian-born citizen of this country, the 8th generation descendant of Cornish immigrants, I can’t just leave. I am stuck here, with nowhere else to go.

But I don’t love the drunken violence that plagues our nightspots. So I never drink more than two glasses of alcohol at a time, and I don’t drink alcohol in public venues at all.

I don’t love the hoons who laid blackies on my street corner the other day, and I don’t love road rage. So I have begun leaving home earlier than I need, so I can drive in a calm manner that doesn’t inspire such rage.

I don’t love the way our society seems determined to communicate primarily through the internet. So I try to restrict my facebooking, emails and Skype calls to those people who live away from Perth and I ring my friends regularly and organise to meet with them face-to-face for a good ol’ fashioned chat.

I don’t love the way so many children seem to be growing up here without any sense of belonging or purpose, or even a basic knowledge of right and wrong. So I work for my church’s children’s ministry. I teach the kids that God is our Boss and we need to obey him, but Jesus died for us so our choices to disobey God can be forgiven – and God has given us two basic instructions to obey: love God, and love other people, our “neighbours”.

I also don’t love the way many couples choose careers and big home loans over time with their spouse and children. So my husband and I have chosen for me to be a stay-at-home mum since the birth of our first child, and I only began working outside our home part-time once our youngest child turned four. We’ve also decided to be content as renters, rather than buyers, so we aren’t forced into high-paying, long-hour careers.

I don’t love the way so many “boatloads” of potential refugees seem to be almost "invading" Australia, rather than immigrating here in an orderly fashion. I don’t love the thought that they might bring with them the very culture of hate they are fleeing. But I also don’t love the way these same “boatloads” of people (not export cattle as that description would seem to suggest) are locked up indefinitely in what amounts to a prison. So our family supports four sponsor children overseas, living in countries and conditions many would love to flee. And I’m trying to teach my own kids not merely basic commonsense politeness and kindness, but also compassion, generosity and mercy.

I do love my Sudanese refugee friends. I love their children, some born in Ugandan refugee camps and others born here, after the couple lived on separate continents for three years, when the wife’s refugee application was approved but the husband’s was not. So I show this love by taking them a box of fruit and veg each week, making their life here a little bit easier and helping them to get their “fair go”. And we’ve given money so the husband can bravely fly back to the new country of Southern Sudan to encourage and train native Sudanese pastors and evangelists, in the hope that the Christian message of forgiveness will make a difference in a country still riven by unforgivenness and torn by retribution killings.

I don’t like the new carbon tax, high petrol prices, or my escalating electricity bill. I also don’t like the thought that my over-use of the earth’s resources might make this earth inhabitable for future generations. So I’m learning to switch my appliances off at the wall when I’m not using them. I recycle so much my yellow-lid bin overflows. I fill my tank when fuelwatch says it’s a cheap day, and I walk where I can. We only water the lawn on our dedicated watering days.

I don’t like the epidemic of obesity I see all around me. So I’ve asked my doctor’s advice for ways I can lose weight and I’m following his suggestions. I’m eating smaller meals and exercising to a Jillian Michaels DVD six times a week. I’m trying to feed my kids junk food less often, as well.

I don’t like the way kids are growing up glued to screens, rather than playing outside or reading good books. So we limit screen time, even in the holidays, despite the whinging. We borrow audio books from the library, read aloud to our kids after dinner, and have taught our kids to read and to borrow their own library books. We have bought bikes, scooters, balls and water guns for our kids to play with. We’ve gratefully received gifts of a swing set and a trampoline, and my husband has built a tree-house. We're re-joining our local karate club and going to karate classes as a family. We wrote a letter to the local council thanking them when they put in a footpath so our kids could safely scoot or ride to the nearby playground without going on the road.

I don’t love racism. I do love my country, Australia. On Australia Day, I had morning tea with my friends, one born an Aussie, the other a naturalised citizen born in Zambia. I made plans to read the Bible with my Thai immigrant friend, who doesn’t yet speak English well enough to get a good job, but is working hard to bring up her son well as a single mum. I shared dinner with my neighbour from down the street, an Iranian woman who immigrated here this year and is looking for work as an engineer, and with an Australian who has spent much of the last decade living overseas as a missionary. And I smiled as my four kids, who with their looks could easily be poster children for a White Australia, ran in the rain under the glow of fireworks and lightning.

The truth is, I don’t always love Australia the way it is. But rather than leave, I’ve chosen to make Australia better. Even if I can only affect my own family and my own neighbourhood, my efforts will be worthwhile.

This Blogger is TEMPORARILY not Blogging

Hi to all of you wonderful regular readers of my blog!

Due to a sudden and unexpected - and delightful - turn of events, I have a pressing need to direct my writing energies elsewhere for a while, and maybe even the next few months. (If you want a hint, check out my tags for this post.) For that reason, I won't be posting on Equip Academy at least for the next fortnight, and probably (God willing!) until around mid-February 2010.

If it makes you feel any better, I'm giving up TV as well. Even though The Office is showing two nights a week at a manageable time starting this week!

Please keep me in your prayers. I look forward to writing for you again in 2010.

Grace, peace and love in Christ,
Sharon

PS If you are hanging out for something else to read online, you might like to check out these blogs, which I will also be reading (some more frequently than others):

Amy Edward's blog Veritas at Home - an American homeschooling mum of four + one in-utero, who loves BSF like me and is a faithful Christian. (Did I mention Amy's blog shares a "birthday" with mine, and we have become great blogging buddies since we met online?)

Meredith's blog The Key to the Door - a fellow Perthite whose husband is a graduate of the same Theological College as mine, Meredith shares insights from her Bible reading and on Christian living.

John Granger's blog Forks High School Professor - for those who share with me a fascination in the deeper meanings buried in by Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga.

Kellie's blog Blue House Academy - another Christian homeschooler, whose American family is "touched by Austism".

For other recommendations, please check out the "Blogs I enjoy" and "Friends who blog" links in my left hand sidebar.

Meyer and her Plain Folks

And while we're on the topic of propaganda, has anyone noticed how blatant Stephenie Meyer is in her use of the Plain Folks technique? She's been using it from the beginning to the end of these books, in comments such as these:
"A huge thank you to... my online family, the talented staff and writers at fansofrealitytv.com..." (from Twilight's Acknowledgements page.)
"And thanks also to my favourite band, the very aptly named Muse, for providing a saga's worth of inspiration." (from Breaking Dawn's Dedication page.)
Not to mention in her (now removed) MySpace site and her ringing endorsement of fansites such as TwilightLexicon.com.

The TwiSaga: a pre-evangelistic treatise for Mormonism?

***Edit: This post seems to be generating a steady stream of interest, now almost a year after I wrote it. If you are interested in LDS connections to these books, you might be interested in reading some of my other posts on the Twilight books (click on the TWILIGHT SAGA tag at the end of this post), or you may wish to visit the Hogwarts Professor's Twilight category of posts. If you are looking for a great deal more detail, particularly if you are planning to teach on the topic, can I suggest you read Spotlight: A close-up look at the artistry and meaning of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga by John Granger (the aforementioned "Hogwarts Professor"). Sandra L Gravett's short book from Twilight to Breaking Dawn: Religious themes in the Twilight Saga is also helpful, although it deals mainly with broader Christian metaphorical typing and allusion, with little reference to the specifically LDS perspectives. Both books are available through Amazon and other retailers.***


***Edit: You might be interested to know that the author of the article I am responding to in this post has commented, and I have responded below her comment.***

Aha! The secret has become public! A Mormon has written an article for The West Australian newspaper's "Agenda" segment today explaining some of the most obvious Mormonisms of the Twilight series: "Being a vampire means being powerful, strong and beautiful, with a generous helping of unearned wealth. For Meyer's family of vampires, it also offers a number of payoffs offered by religion, in particular, the Mormon brand: Eternal Life, Eternal Family and Eternal Love." Nothing like sparing use of the propaganda technique of Transfer, is there?

Not only that, the article's author actually went so far as to use Twilight's Mormonisms as a hook to invite readers who can't get enough of the books to "pop in one Sunday to your local Mormon church. They won't bite."

The last two paragraphs in full:
"And while women are beyond exactly placing themselves in Bella's shoes, Edward is the man they want for their husband/boyfriend/ next internet date. Danger arises when, without another Twilight book to read, life begins to feel empty. Readers want to prolong the experience but I believe Stephenie Meyer will resist the temptation to extend the story.
She'll leave Bella and Edward where they belong, deep in the dream of Happily Ever After. Escape your ordinary world in other ways - see the film of New Moon, read the fanfiction on Twilighted.net, or pop in one Sunday to your local Mormon church. They won't bite."
Anyone looking for an exemplar of the Lesser of Two Evils propaganda technique?

I've been waiting for this moment to arrive since I first read the comment below on a Normal Mormon Husbands blog post (it is currently the first of 153 comments on that post). Sandy wrote [my emphasis]:
"Do you think that would work as a missionary line? 'We would like to tell you about a wonderful plan for your family to be together forever...and you DON'T even have to suck their blood! Would you like to hear more?'"

It seems the New Moon movie was just popular enough for Mormons to start deciding they should capitalise on the pre-evangelistic treatise that the Twilight Saga may provide. Or given the imminent release of John Granger's book Spotlight, which will expose and explain many of the Mormon metaphors in the Twilight books next month, perhaps certain LDS members feel they should take what evangelistic opportunities they can before Meyer's insistence that the books have nothing to do with her Mormon faith is shown to be complete codswallop.

Or... could the article be a one-off that just somehow managed to get past The West's editors since they needed something to publish in response to the phenomenal box office achievements of New Moon and someone just happened to hand them this piece? I can't work it out. The West's website can't find the article for me, no matter which way I search. The author "Melissa O'Shea", who is apparently real enough for Bill Hatto to photograph her for the piece, is curiously unable to be found by google. (The piece's photographer Bill Hatto is on google. Even I am on google! How in all the sticky wwweb can someone be published in a state newspaper and have a PhD and remain hidden from google???) And while we are on the topic of PhDs, who (according to the author bio at the end of the two-page article) "has a PhD in writing" from an unspecified university?

Perhaps the LDS church aren't so ready to admit to Twilight's religious metaphors after all...

Since it is so mysteriously missing from online sources elsewhere, I am going to include a scan of the piece here, for your elucidation:(Click on the image and then zoom in to read the text yourself.)

[I use "Mormon" in this post because that is the word that was used in the article I am commenting on. Stephenie Meyer is a Latter-day Saint, or "LDS", a member of the largest church that, together with other groups tracing their religious roots back to Joseph Smith Jr, are collectively are known as Mormons.]

Abigail's DIY Haircut - My Grump

Yesterday while I was in the shower, Abigail cut her hair. Only the hair on the left hand side, because the scissors were in her right hand. As soon as I got out of the shower, Anna ran in to tell me. Aargh!

I was particularly annoyed because Joshua cut Anna's hair a few years back (right down to her double crown) and we have since been very specific and clear that kids are not allowed to cut hair in our family. I know that Abi remembers the rule, because she tried to do it a little while back (after I had left it too long to cut her fringe) and has been growing out two side snips for the last few months. I remind her about it every time she complains that those bits won't stay in her plaits: it's her own fault that they aren't long enough.

I've had a very recent conversation with a dear friend about the vagaries of children's behaviour and how easy it is to respond with anger and a lecture. So this time, I was prevented from responding in quite the way I had after Anna and Joshua's escapade with the scissors - I think the description "volcanic" would probably best describe my reaction then, much to my shame. So while I calmed down enough to deal with the situation properly, I sent Abigail off to bed and rang Jeff. He'd taken the boys to the shops & I arranged to meet him there so we could decide how much needed to be cut off by a professional to make dear Abigail presentable again.

In the end, the hairdresser cut off about three inches. There is still a big chunk about two inches shorter than the rest that needs to grow out, but if we cut it all to that length, Abi's hair would be too short for plaits. That would annoy her (and me) no end, because her hair is quite fine and flyaway. If it is going to be longer than a bob, it needs to be long enough to pull back, or it will get very tangly, very quickly. And I'm not ready for her to have short hair.

So here are the before and after pictures. The first was taken on the weekend, while Abigail was dressed up to play bridesmaid for Anna as the bride.

















One of the things this incident has taught me, or at least reminded me, is how much of my heart I have invested in my children's lives. In such an insignificant thing as their appearance! I know that most of the reason I want my girls to have long hair is that I didn't have long hair as a child, although I wanted to at times. It wasn't until I was in senior high school that Mum let me grow it longer, when I was old enough to take care of it completely myself. I have tended to fluctuate between long and short hair since then. Perhaps I need to grow my own hair again (last time it was long was three years ago), so I can stop living vicariously through my daughters.

But it is more than that. I needed to remember that, no matter how much effort I put into my children's lives, they won't be able to live up to my hopes for them... not all my hopes, dreams and aspirations, anyway. It is good to have hopes and even goals to help my children achieve, but ultimately, it is their lives, not mine. I wouldn't want to become like this mother, who "posed as [her] daughter to become a cheerleader"! There is only one person whose life I may lead, and that is mine.

God wants me to live my life in a way that brings Him glory, and making an idol of my daughters' long hair (or anything else) is not the way to do that!

Could "bad writing" be a sign of a very, very accomplished author?

While the fans of the TwiSaga, known as "Twilighters" or "Twi-Hards", may be overwhelmingly characterised by post comments such as OM*!!! Edward is so totally awesome! The anti-fans can be easily identified by the burgeoning number of WT*??? Edward is totally a stalker! comments on their sites. I would like to think that I have a slightly higher level of functional literacy skills than comments such as these require, so you won't read either of these statements again in this post. But I do want to posit that although Stephenie Meyer's use of adjectives in the TwiSaga books may legitimately be characterised as poor, Meyer is perhaps the most canny writer whose works I have ever read.

There is no shortage of people on the internet willing to claim that Meyer's writing is bad. Here's one, which says the writing is "arduous to read"; here's another, where most of the commenters seem to think the last book is an extreme Mary Sue story; and here's a third, from a Mormon source. So what are we to make of all this negative criticism?

Let me ask you, if you were dreaming of being an author,

1. Would you rather:
A) Be listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the top-selling author in the world? or
B) Have your unsold books remaindered after your death?

2. Would you rather:
A) Be earning $250 million from one book alone? or
B) Be writing semi-autobiographical novels based on your life in poverty?

So, would you rather be an "A-class" author, like prolific romance novel author Barbara Cartland and airport novel writer Dan Brown, or a "B-class" author, like Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte?

The truth is, critical responses decrying certain authors as "bad writers" are not necessarily a sign that the books themselves are not going to be popular, and well liked by their target audience. They just don't fit a literary ideal. Furthermore, books that are considered classics of literature and authorial gems nowadays were not necessarily well received initially.

Here's what Meyer has to say on the subject (at her website):
It's inevitable that the bigger your audience gets, the bigger the group who doesn't like what they're reading will be. Because no book is a good book for everyone. Every individual has their own personal taste and experience, and that's why there are such a great variety of books on the shelves. There are lots of very popular books that I don't enjoy at all. Conversely, there are books that I adore that no one else seems to care about. The surprise to me is that so many people do like my books. I wrote them for a very specific audience of one, and so there was no guarantee that any other person on the planet besides me would enjoy them. ... If I could go back in time, knowing everything I know right now, and write the whole series again, I would write exactly the same story. (The writing would be better, though—practice makes perfect.)

Stephenie Meyer has written books that probably fit closer into the "A-class" category above than the "B-class". In terms of sales, the four TwiSaga books took our four of the top ten book sales figures for 2008 in both the US and the UK, and she was the top selling author in the US last year as well. So despite originally writing Twilight for "an audience of one" (that is, for her own pleasure), and her own admission that the writing was less than sterling, Meyer's books obviously fit her reading audience's preferred writing style precisely, if not that of the literary critics.

Every time I read the word "gotten" in the books (it was there at least once in all of them), I cringed. But I have to admit, each time it was there, it was part of a conversation or internal monologue of a character whose age, education and maturity made the choice of word an application of the character's identity, rather than a reflection of the author's grammatical deficiencies. Here is the first such instance:

Charlie had really been fairly nice about the whole thing. He seemed genuinely pleased that I was coming to live with him for the first time with any degree of permanence. He'd already gotten me registered for high school and was going to help me get a car.

As I said, internal monologue. And this one example also provides an instance where Meyer has replicated such a monologue quite realistically. Bella is ruminating over the circumstances of her move. Her thoughts flow from considering her father Charlie's reaction to her imminent arrival under his roof, to recalling his actions that provided evidence for her interpretation of his emotions. I find this scenario completely believeable.

And to me, believability is the key to Meyer's success. Although she has written a fiction series that fits neatly into the fantasy genre, each of her books present completely believable characters. Bella's thoughts of Edward in Twilight surely held little appeal for those who criticised Bella as interminably whingy - but then, I imagine those same people would have very little patience were they to meet any real teenager in the middle of their first serious romantic crush. I remember my own teenage years quite clearly. I've also been a high school teacher. The little glimpses of teenage thoughts one gets from teaching are enough to tell me that this book captures perfectly the thoughts, experiences and actions of many a young girl falling in love for the first time. Yes, the early chapters Twilight at times read like a relationship anecdote from Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. But then, the disparity between the sexes and their miscommunication is a major cause for real-life teenage hormonally-driven melancholy. Perhaps some of what critics do not like in the novel is the same thing that attracts their target market: the perfect depiction of an average teenage girl's emotional experiences.

Interestingly, some critics find that the last book of the TwiSaga falls down in the believeability stakes. They complain that Breaking Dawn degenerates into "Mary Sue" writing, where Bella displays "overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws ... primarily functioning as [a] wish-fulfillment [for the] author" (according to Wikipedia's definition). Now, given that Meyer has repeatedly stated that she writes her books with her own enjoyment of the story in mind, not others, the suitability of the latter part of the definition was never in dispute. In response to the former part of the definition, I have to wonder whether any of the critics who commented on the post linked above have ever heard of the ancient classical rhetorical device called hyperbole. According to Wikipedia, hyperbole is "a figure of speech in which statements are exaggerated. It may be used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression, but is rarely meant to be taken literally." Now, Meyer is writing fantasy fiction, so she can't be expected to produce writing that finishes with the sort of "that's too bad - that's life" ending of many (disturbingly popular) chick lit novels for adult women nowadays. I wonder if the women who read these novels do so in order to confirm to themselves that even in books the perfect ending isn't going to happen. Whatever their reason, this type of Byronic ennui is inappropriate for an author writing for young adults.

Furthermore, since, IMO, Meyer was writing a series that functions perfectly as a religious allegory and pre-evangelistic marketing tool for her religion (Mormonism), an idealistic ending for the newest members of the perfect Mormon family, as epitomised in the Cullen coven, is only to be expected.

One last question.

3. Would you like to be known as:
A) An author whose gently religious allegorical tales for children are enjoyed by millions (but not by your close friend), then made into movies that become a box office smash? or
B) A school teacher whose blatantly anti-Christian children's books are controversial (yet win awards), and are made into movies that bomb at the box office?

In case you didn't know, The A author above was CS Lewis, whose book The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (from the Chronicles of Narnia) is an allegory of the Christian gospel. It was made into a movie a few years ago and reached "the Top 25 of all films released to that time (by revenue)." [See figures here.]
The B author was Philip Pullman, whose trilogy His Dark Materials was apparently written as an atheistic rebuttal of Lewis's Narnia series. The movie of the first book grossed only a touch more domestically in its entire run than the Twilight Movie did in it's opening weekend.

Meyer's books have had a very mixed reception from those who share her religious faith. She has more in common with Lewis, whose friend JRR Tolkein "was not enthusiastic about the Narnia stories," than Pullman. What is certain, is that like both Pullman and Lewis, she has written a story with a strong religious message. I will explore the connections between the TwiSaga books and the LDS religion in another post.

And once again, to thank you for getting to the end of a very long post, here's something to amuse you. But be warned, it contains swearing (written, not spoken), so I have taken down the video. Apologies for the lack of warning previously, Amy.

Sunday Moments

As usual on Sunday, I walked to church with the kids twice: once for morning church and once for evening church. Do you think I am being disrespectful to God if I go to evening church in my ugg boots?

On the way to morning church, I had a wonderful God Chat with Anna. It went something like this.
Anna: "Mummy, did you know that I love you?"
Me: "Yes, Anna, I did know that. I love you too."
Anna: "But Mummy... did you know that... I love God more than I love you?"
Me: "I'm glad to hear that, Anna. I love God lots and lots, too. But you know what? Sometimes I don't love God as much as I know I should. And I don't worship Him or obey Him as well as I want to, either."
Anna: "Don't worry, Mummy. We are all sinners, and none of us are as good as Jesus."
Me: "You're right Anna. So I am glad that when God looks at us, He doesn't see our sin, but instead he sees Jesus' goodness and righteousness."
Anna: "Mmm."
Me: "Remember the Colin song, Big Words That End in SHUN? There's that word in it: Imputation." (Sings a line from the song.) "Imputa-SHUN, Jesus' righteousness made mine."
Anna: "Oh, yeah, I remember. That is good, Mummy."
Me: "It sure is."

I am very grateful for the wonderful Christians who make music that helps me to teach my kids about Jesus Christ, and what he has done for us, such as Colin Buchanan and EMU Kids Music.

It was really exciting to hear one of our elders preach this Sunday, completing a five week sermon series expanding on the elders' vision for our church in the future, and how we shall (by God's grace) bring glory to the LORD. One of the best bits was officially hearing that the elders would like to employ a full time, theologically- and educationally-trained person as a Children's Worker, to develop a Bible-based Sunday School program for use with the children in our church; to train our Sunday School teachers so that they have an easier time helping disciple our kids; and possibly even to extend the children's ministry of our congregation through holiday or after-school programs so that more children from our local community can hear the word of God. This is very exciting stuff!

On the way to evening church, I had another wonderful God Chat, this time with Joshua, who had been on a Boys' Brigades camp overnight with Jeff. Here's a paraphrase.
Joshua: "Mum, why do some people like to listen to scary stories?"
Me: "Well..." (Pause for thinking; perhaps now was not a good time to get into a discussion about how people's sinful nature makes it enjoyable for our thoughts to dwell on evil; this might be a little beyond him - he is only six, after all.)
Me: "I guess it is partly because some people don't like to think that what the Bible says about what happens after we die is true - that people who have believed in Jesus Christ and trusted Him, putting their faith in Him only, will go to heaven, but those people who haven't put their faith in Jesus will go to hell, forever. Lots of people want to believe that something else might happen instead, like we become ghosts, or something. So they make up spooky stories."
>Joshua: "Ah."
Me: "And I guess one good thing about scary stories is that we know we really can believe what the Bible tells us about what happens when we die, and when we hear those stories we might get an opportunity to tell our friends the truth. It is pretty important that people get to hear the truth, so that they don't believe that ghosts and other made-up things are real."
Joshua: "Yeah, Mum, you're right. ... Mummy, are you sure Drop Bears aren't real?"
Me: "Yes, Joshua, I'm sure Drop Bears aren't real."

Romans 3:21-28 says,
21But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.27Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On that of observing the law? No, but on that of faith. 28For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.

Romans 6:22-23 tells us,
22But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. 23For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

[Ugg boot picture from here. I am strongly opposed to the registration by a foreign company of the word UGG as a trademark in Australia, where the word, with alternate spellings such as Ugh and Ug, has been used for a long time as a generic name for boots made from sheepskin. Registering the name Ugg as a trademark in Australia (or preventing Australian suppliers from selling overseas using this name for their Australian product) is about as ridiculous as trademarking the word slipper, IMO. For more on this issue, see here.]

Gotta love the 25 hour day!

I woke up this morning when Sam crawled into bed and thought, I have to get up soon. Then I thought, no I don't, it's the end of daylight saving today! and so I have a whole extra hour in my day. What shall I do with it, I wonder?

Well, I did do some nice things with my bonus hour, you will be delighted to know.

When Anna asked me if she could read her Bible to me, I said, "Sure sweetheart, come and lie next to Mummy on the bed and you can read it to me right now". I didn't say, "Not now, honey, I'm too busy getting ready for church." Duh. I think I should have more of these "end of daylight saving" days if it can help me re-prioritise like that. I mean, what's the point of going to church to listen to the Bible being read and expounded upon with other Christians if I won't even commit time to listening to my own darling daughter read from the Bible to me? That was a really good start to my day.

It was also encouraging to me that when Joshua asked if I could help him with his uniform socks and shoes, I had enough time not to do it just to get it over and done, but to ask him to have a try himself. And, of course, with a little extra time, he did manage wonderfully, even though his socks are really quite long and stiff.

Not only that, but because Joshua was upset at the prospect of missing Sunday School at our church, because I was taking the kids to another church for their Brigades' service, I didn't tell him just to get over it (as I probably would usually have done, if I was in a hurry). Rather, I took the time to find out what exactly was bothering him. Then I rang his Sunday School teacher so that she could reassure him over the phone that missing one day of Sunday School in order to attend church with a different congregation would not take him out of the running for the end of year perfect attendance reward, which is what was concerning him about the whole thing. And so the problem was dealt with and resolved, rather than being ignored and left to fester (the biblical term is to become a "bitter root", I think).

And having that extra hour up my sleeve meant that I was able to be very gracious and think of Jeff's needs, rather than my own, and let him know that I would take Sam with the rest of the kids so that he didn't have to come back from church to take Sam with him, and foist him onto another family there, just so I didn't have to deal with getting all four children into and out of the car what seemed like a dozen times. Jeff was preaching this morning and after my somewhat critical critique (?!) last night he went in to church early today so that he could tweak the sermon before the service. (Happily, he thinks it went well, by the way.) And I got all four kids ready, including two into uniforms and two into plaits, without feeling put-upon [favourite Thomas phrase] once. Hooray! Unfortunately I must admit that this wonderful exhibition of emotional self-control was entirely to blame on the clock and not on my own response to the Holy Spirit's counsel.

Much of the extra hour did get eaten up by the extra travel to a different church site (40km round trip), leaving me feeling very blessed by the fact that we now live so close to the place where we gather for public worship. We got there on time, hooray.

Not only that but I was in time to get a seat up the front where I could watch my beautiful little Anna's face when she decided she was brave enough to hold her Captain's hand and walk up to stand with all the other new girls out the front and agree with them to "obey my leader and always try my hardest" (and a few other things), when she said proudly right into the mike, "I do!" Whoo-hoo! There were more than 300 people in that church auditorium. Anna stood straight and tall and didn't wriggle or fidgit one bit up there, didn't even let her eyes wander. She was very very brave for such a little, shy girl. I was so proud of her!

When I got home from church I wasn't as exhausted as I normally am - all this extra time made me feel quite relaxed all day - and instead of sending Abi down cold to her nap, I lay with her and read aloud a few stories from her story Bible (she picked stories of Moses and Joseph from her little kid's message).

Later, when Sam woke up from his nap in a clingy mood, I used a snippet of my extra time to take him for a horsey ride around the play room as I did a bit of a tidy up of the spreading morass of toys in there.

I used another moment of extra time to think before I automatically said "no" to Joshua's request to play out in the front yard, and instead said, "Sure, honey, and ask Anna if she'd like to play out there with you as well. Have a great time."

I took another, slightly larger portion of the extra time to check on the kdis later and gently ask Joshua to ensure that when they were finished with the makeshift cubby of outdoor chairs that they had built on the next-door neighbour's front lawn, that they picked up every single one of the little twigs they were using for "firewood" and didn't leave them strewn all over J and T's immaculately manicured greenery.

When Anna came running in from the front yard itching all over, I didn't get all fussed over the time, and hastily put on some Stingose just to deal with the symptom of the problem but not the root cause. Instead, I used a bit of my extra time to wash her off carefully and then to explain that it seemed that she was allergic to the grass, just like Mummy was as a child, and that she could only play on the swing and climb the tree, not crawl and roll around on the grass under their cubby as she had been doing or she would just get itchy again.

And I took a few minutes to make sure that Joshua had done as I asked and cleaned up all those twigs. (He had, I am happy to report.)

One final thing helped to use up the last bit of my bonus time. Jeff hadn't set the clock on his phone back, so he came home early from church this arvo (having gone in for some peace and quiet while he finalised the lecture he is doing for the Faith and Science cafe-church-thingy tonight), thinking it was later than it was. So even though Jeff was very busy today, preaching/teaching on two different topics, we still were able to eat dinner as a family and chat about our day as a family. We do normally eat dinner as a family. But it is always extra special to be able to do it without rushing, even though Jeff is going to be out for the evening.

Now I come to think of it, it seemed like there was a whole lot more than one extra hour in my day today. But maybe that was because it was my attitude to the time that had changed.

I think I am going to vote for Daylight Saving in the referendum, just so I can have another unrushed day like this again, even if it's only once a year!

A letter to the editor

Re: "Rudd set on paying working mums more" by Andrew Tillett, The West Australian Saturday, October 4, 2008 pg16Rudd’s plan to pay working mums more than stay-at-home mothers for their mothering care in the first few months is short-sighted.

Women who choose to stay at home for only a short period of time after their child’s birth experience minimal disruption to their career path and its financial rewards.

Women who decide to have subsequent children before returning to paid employment make a much greater financial sacrifice. They give up an ongoing income flow by not returning to work in the intervening time and also face greater barriers to picking up their career. They are often no longer employable in their previous field, certainly far from able to fit smoothly back into the vaunted career track, and must accept either a lower paid job in a different field or the added financial burden of re-training.

I have decided these disadvantages are outweighed by the benefits to my four children (and the community) of my staying at home. Others may not be financially free to make this choice.

Maternity pay for those who were already established in the previous “job” of stay-at-home mother is essential, if we are to encourage women to have more than one baby. Otherwise the only thing this new maternity leave scheme will do is reward families who choose to have less children – and Australians are doing that in droves already.

Obama on abortion

Barack Obama at Saddleback Church:
"I am pro-choice. I believe in Roe versus Wade. And, and I come to that conclusion not because I'm pro-abortion; but because, ultimately, I don't think women make these decisions casually. I think they, they wrestle with these things in profound ways."

I find this comment fascinating and distressing. Not because American politics holds any interest to me (I find American presidential campaigns baffling as well as boring), rather because I love my children now and I loved them from the moment I knew they were growing inside me. The baby whom we lost to miscarriage between my pregnancies with Joshua and Anna was loved and prayed for and is still mourned. I think back with sadness and shame to the occasion I took the morning after pill to avoid an "inconvenient" pregnancy when a condom broke, and pray that I might be forgiven for cutting short any life that had already been conceived within me that day. I am forever grateful to my Father in Heaven who has forgiven my sin, Whose Son took my punishment when He died on the cross for me. I know He loves my children - all of them, born and unborn - much more than I could ever imagine.

Obama's comment forces me to ask: Isn't the single characteristic which makes murder different to manslaughter - and so much more monstrous - the forethought that precedes the action? So why, then, does Obama think that a deliberate prior decision to take a life somehow makes the action of taking that life acceptable? I do not understand this. Taking a life is taking a life, whether one "wrestles" with the moral implications or not. The choice of abortion must be condemned for what it is: a deliberate, wilful act of murder.

The Bible on Murder
Exodus 20:13 (the sixth commandment) says, "You shall not commit murder." Consider what God said to Cain after he murdered his brother Abel (Genesis 4:10-11): "The LORD said, 'What have you done? Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground. Now you are under a curse...' " What curse will be put on those among us who allow these murders to continue? And think upon how God warned Noah after the flood (Genesis 9:5-6): " 'And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.' " What accounting will be made of our involvement in this continued genocide? Even the tiniest baby is made in the image of God. This image-bearing status cannot be removed by any decision of the mother, casual or otherwise. It was and is the gift of God. May His name be glorified in all the earth!

In defense of the modern English Bibles

Since I have been posting a critique of a critique of the recent (last 30 years or so) Bible translations for the last few posts, and prompted by Mrs Edwards comment, I will now add that the differences between any English translation are very very small in comparison to the overwhelming volume of agreement between translations (with perhaps the one exception of the Jehovah's Witnesses' Bible, the NWT).
Every single Christian doctrine is supported by multiple verses in the new translations, as well as in the KJV. This is because while there may be small differences between versions, no doctrine has ever been based on a single verse, but based on many verses which together provide a whole, consistent picture. As Christians, whether we read from the KJV, the NIV, the NASB, the ESV or many of the other translations, we can be reassured that what we read is giving us an accurate picture of God's plan to give eternal salvation to His chosen people through the atoning death of His only Son, Jesus Christ.

As Mrs Edwards wrote so well in her comment to my previous post:

After I first studied all of this years ago, I decided that the KJV was decidedly inferior. But, in that response I was making the same error that I was reacting to, namely, deciding that only one translation is "true." We are so blessed by centuries of textual scholarship that now English translations are well footnoted to bring our attention to the various contradictions in texts or give the alternate word or phrase from other manuscripts for our consideration.

I currently use the ESV for my devotions, a text that "is based on the Masoretic text as found in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia..." However, the translation team factored in modern scholarship and textual discoveries, improving upon the KJV or RSV. And I have NIV on the shelf along with some other translations.

Translations will always be flawed to some degree and for some this admission feels threatening. I don't agree. I like how the preface to the ESV concludes: "We know that no Bible translation is perfect or final; but we also know that God uses imperfect and inadequate things to his honor and praise."

I have faith that the Holy Spirit is speaking to me through the Bible. While I don't need a textual analysis to bolster that faith, I am satisfied knowing that the English Bible's accuracy and faithfulness to the original manuscript has held up very well to scholarship. (By contrast, the keepers of the "sacred" text of another world religion prohibit outside scholarship, until methinks they protest too much.)

I couldn't have put it better myself.

Beechick on the KJV, pt 2 of a very long rebuttal

Before you read this, please consider reading my previous post which consisted of a rebuttal of two previous paragraphs from Ruth Beechick's description of "How the Bible Came to Us". Text in Courier is from Ruth Beechick's A Biblical Home Education, pp 18-20. Beechick's thesis seems to be that the King James Version is the only reliable version of the Bible. Text in Georgia is mine. I disagree with Beechick's thesis. I have been greatly helped in my research by DA Carson's The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1979). I have also made use of Bruce L Shelley's Church History in Plain Language (2nd ed, Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1995) and Justo L Gonzales's The Story of Christianity: Volume 1 (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1984).

Just to recap, Beechick claimed that the KJV was based upon 5000+ New Testament manuscripts known as the Textus Receptus, all of which "say the same thing". In reality, it was based upon a handful of partial Greek New Testaments all older the 9th century (and the Latin Vulgate in a few places), critically compiled by the Catholic humanist, Erasmus, in the 16th century. Erasmus' text came to be known as the Textus Receptus after the KJV was translated, based upon a publisher's advertising claim made on its cover. The TR belongs within the Byzantine text-type tradition, for which there is no unambiguous evidence prior to the middle of the 4th century, unlike the other three extant text-types, the Alexandrian, Western and Caesarean. No known Greek manuscript is exactly identical to any other.

Further, Beechick argued that the Septuagint (LXX) was translated by Jews in "the third century" based upon a corrupt Jewish Old Testament and that a New Testament was also produced by them. She also made claims that Origen (one of the early church fathers) was not orthodox in many of his beliefs and that his writings were passed on to Eusebius. Beechick's argument regarding the LXX's history is erroneous (it was translated 400-600 years earlier than she claimed) and her claim of Alexandrian Jews translating the NT is preposterous. Jesus, the New Testament authors and all the early church fathers quoted from the LXX, not Beechick's preferred Masoretic text. Beechick's attack on Origen is both a misinformed and misleading ad hominem attack and is the beginnings of an irrelevant straw man argument against the validity of the non-Byzantine NT text-types, given that Origen worked with the OT not the NT.

So now on with the following paragraph:

Emperor Constantine asked Eusebius for fifty copies of the Bible to send to fifty cities, so he used Origen's writings to make those for the emperor. ~~~Exaggeration #4: It took me ages to find a reliable source that confirmed this as a historical event. In the end I had to check out Eusebius' own Life of Constantine Bk4 Ch34-39, which testifies to this event. Eusebius' account does not include the detail of whether he used Origen's writings as source material, so I am unable to verify the accuracy of Beechick's statement. [Later in this paragraph, Beechick connects Eusebius' Bible with the Alexandrian and Caesarean text-types, so I will address those from now on.]  The papyrus known as p75 is a prime example of the Alexandrian tradition and has been dated to about AD200 and possibly earlier, predating Origen's writings. For comparison, Origen lived AD185-254 and Eusebius is thought to have lived circa AD260-340. According to Carson, all of the text-types except Beechick's preferred Byzantine pre-date Origen. The churches of the day did not receive that heretical version. ~~~Exaggeration #5: I have already shown that Beechick's ad hominem attack on Origen as a heretic is exaggerated, and even if it was not, it does not follow that his Hexapla would be heretical also. Eusebius was the author of the majority of the AD325 Nicean Creed, the foundational creed for all Christian denominations, so Eusebius' orthodoxy cannot be questioned. He would therefore have no reason to propagate heretical manuscripts. ~~~Error #6:  Aside from this, Eusebius' Bible was indeed received favourably, according to Eusebius' own historical account above. For example, Eusebius recounts (Ch37) that the receipt of the manuscripts by Constantine "is attested by another letter, which the emperor wrote in acknowledgment, in which, having heard that the city Constantia in our country, the inhabitants of which had been more than commonly devoted to superstition, had been impelled by a sense of religion to abandon their past idolatry, he testified his joy, and approval of their conduct." They did not use it or make copies of it, and it almost became lost to history. ~~~Error #7: The ante-Nicene church fathers did use the Alexandrian text-type: they quoted from it. There are multiple Greek papyri from the second and third centuries which reflect mixed Alexandrian/Western text-types. With regard to the OT text, Augustine of Hippo (AD354-430) vigorously criticised Jerome's use of the Masoretic text in his Latin translation (the Vulgate), writing of "the Septuagint, whose authority has no equal." Then in the 1800s two manuscripts were found that could possibly be two of those fifty, one found in the Vatican and one in a monastery in the Sinai. ~~~Error #8: Both of these manuscripts are uncials which have been dated to the fourth century, and they belong to two different text-types (that is, they originate from two different ancestor manuscripts). It is possible that one of these is a descendant copy of Eusebius' Bible, but I fail to see the relevance of this in establishing its authority, given that the church fathers accepted these text-types as authoritative. One of these manuscripts belongs to the Alexandrian text-type, which as I have already said, predates Origen: Vaticanus, aka B. The other belongs to the Caesarean (mixed Alexandrian/Western) text-type: Sinaiticus, aka Chi. The Caesarean text-type may have been brought to Caesarea by Origen, but this is irrelevant because its existence predates his work.  Those two were not complete and they had many differences between them. Yet a couple of men (Brooke Westcott and Fenton J. A. Hort) made a Greek New Testament from those two manuscripts. ~~~Observation: For comparison, none of the Greek NT manuscripts used by Erasmus was a complete text, and several verses in his published edition are found in no extant Greek manuscript at all; they were translated into the Greek by Erasmus himself from the Latin Vulgate. Erasmus constructed his Greek NT editions from four to six manuscripts. Just for the record, Erasmus staunchly remained a confessing Catholic at the height of the Reformation, not exactly a model of (Protestant) orthodoxy himself, if there is any benefit to considering the doctrinal beliefs of the compilers and translators. These men, like Origen, did not believe in many essential Christian doctrines. ~~~Observation: Another unsubstantiated ad hominem attack. As with the criticisms of Origen, it has no bearing, because a heretic can still be a perfectly able scholar when it comes to technical analysis and comparison of manuscripts. They said the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus manuscripts were older and better than the over 5000 manuscripts of the Textus Receptus (also called the Majority Text). ~~~Exaggeration #6: The Vaticanus and Sinaiticus are older than the manuscripts used in compiling the TR by half a millenia. This is not a matter of opinion, established only by "they said", but a matter of established fact. Older does not necessarily mean better, but neither does a greater number of texts. Again, the fallacious "5000" is referred to, but calling the TR "the Majority Text" does not guarantee its integrity. While it is true that 95% of the Greek manuscripts available belong to the Byzantine text-type (which the TR falls within), it also must be recognised that around 95% of these are miniscules which are dated later than the 7th century. The Byzantine manuscripts almost all come from the Greek-speaking Byzantine (Eastern Orthodox) empire, which collapsed after the fall of Constantinople (AD 1453). This happened shortly before Erasmus collated his Greek NT, providing the manuscripts he used. Even the fact that the Byzantine manuscripts were written in Greek does not necessarily give them greater authority. Greek manuscripts were not propagated in the Western Roman Catholic church after the middle of the fourth century. This was because Latin had supplanted Greek as the vernacular language of the West and they used Old Latin translations and then Jerome's Latin Vulgate. Careful textual analysis of Vaticanus, p75 and other closely related manuscripts suggests the Alexandrian text-type, as preserved in the Vaticanus, is the closest to the lost original autographs of all the known manuscripts. We might ask whether God's true Word was lost for those many centuries until somebody found it again, or did God preserve it for all those generations through the Majority Text? ~~~Exaggeration #7: It is true that God preserved the Byzantine text-type in one small corner of the world for one thousand years. However, it must also be recognised that apart from within the Eastern Orthodox church, the Latin Vulgate was used almost exclusively by the much larger Roman Catholic church, and this translation was based mainly upon a non-Byzantine text-type. I do not think that Beechick would follow her argument to it's natural conclusion and suggest that we all forsake our KJVs along with the NIVs and revert to Jerome's Vulgate. Most new English versions today come from the Greek New Testament begun by Origen. ..." ~~~Final summation: this statement has been shown to be fallacious. On the contrary, most new English versions today, such as the NIV, are carefully based on an eclectic selection of the best testified and most authoritative manuscripts available.

At the end of this paragraph Beechick cites One Book Stands Alone by Dr Douglas D Stauffer (Milbrook, AL: McCowen Mills Publishers, 2001). I haven't read it, so I am not sure how much of the preceeding is taken from this book, and how much is Beechick's own argument.

Beechick on the KJV, a very long rebuttal

Before you read this I would like to state that I do have a very high view of Scripture. I happily agree with the reformation creed "Sola Scriptura", the Bible Alone as the source for knowledge of God.

Text in Courier is from Ruth Beechick's A Biblical Home Education, pp 18-20. Beechick's thesis seems to be that the King James Version is the only reliable version of the Bible. Text in Georgia is mine. I disagree with Beechick's thesis. I have been greatly helped in my research by the simple but immensely clear book by DA Carson, The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1979). I humbly recommend it to all who find this topic interesting, concerning or challenging. I have also made use of Bruce L Shelley's Church History in Plain Language (2nd ed, Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1995). This is a thoroughly readable book on Church History.

Here is a short history of how the English Bible came to us. The original letters and histories of the New Testament that Paul and others wrote were copied and recopied and carried around to the churches. Other writers, too, wrote for the church, and church leaders agreed on which writings were part of the "canon" to be added to the Hebrew Scriptures. So far, so good. As you read further, remember that the New Testament was originally written in Greek ("Koine" Greek, not the earlier "Classical" Greek), the lingua franca of Jesus' time. When the King James translators went to work, they had more than 5000 manuscripts of the New Testament that agreed with each other. ~~~Error #1: The King James translators (working from around 1602-1611) did not have 5000+ manuscripts of the New Testament, at least, not Greek manuscripts. As of (Don Carson's writing in) 1979, there were only around 5000 Greek manuscripts known in total, and around 8000 manuscript versions (that is, early handwritten translations from the Greek into other languages such as Syriac, Coptic and Latin). The 5000 Greek manuscripts known today are not all complete New Testaments. There are (approximately) 2100 lectionary manuscripts (church reading books containing quotations from Scripture), 2700 miniscules (manuscripts using a post-9th century script), 260 uncials (manuscripts using the oldest script, characterised by capital letters only) and about 80 papyri (written on papyrus paper rather than animal skin vellum). The King James was "translated out of the original tongues: and with the former translations diligently compared and revised by His Majesty's special command", according to its title page. Comparisons to these "former translations" suggest the translators relied very heavily on the Great Bible - which was based upon the Bishop's Bible (and Geneva Bible), which was based upon Matthew's Bible, which was largely the work of William Tyndale. The Greek texts which the KJV translators used were editions published by Theodore Beza (Calvin's successor) in 1588-89 and 1598. We might ask from where did Beza obtain his Greek text? It differs little from the 4th edition Greek NT published by Robert Estienne (aka Stephanus) in 1551, which had numbered verses. Where did Stephanus obtain his Greek text? It was based upon Desiderius Erasmus' 4th and 5th critical editions (1520s), and to a much lesser extent the Complutensian Polyglot (1514). Remember Erasmus? Erasmus had access to only a handful of Greek miniscule manuscripts, none of which was a complete NT, and none of which was dated prior to the 10th century. These manuscripts are called the Received Text, or Textus Receptus in Latin. ~~~Error #2: The Textus Receptus (TR) was not a collection of manuscripts. The Textus Receptus title arose from an advertising blurb for the second edition of a printed Greek NT published by the Elzevir brothers in 1624 (13 years after the KJV was first published). The blurb says (in Latin) "The text that you have now received by all, in which we give nothing change or perverted." According to Don Carson, "The TR is not the 'received text' in the sense that it has been received from God as over against other Greek manuscripts. Rather, it is the 'received text' in the sense that it was the standard one at the time of the Elzevirs." Where did the Elzevirs obtained their Greek text? It was largely the same as that of Beza. At last we see how the TR title has come to be abrogated by the KJV. God had promised to preserve His Word for all generations (Psalm 12:6-7) and this seems a better way to do it than to have one original copy in a church or museum somewhere that people claimed was the "original." ~~~Unbiblical argument #1: This does seem a better way to do it if you are thinking from a worldly perspective. But if we are to consider the actions of the God revealed in the Bible, we have to admit that He has usually used the weaker, lesser people (consider his choice of David for king over his elder brothers, 1 Samuel 16) and his means have not always been so overt either (consider Ehud's left-handed sword thrust to kill the king of Moab, Judges 3). The central theme running through the second half of the Old Testament is that God will claim a remnant - a small number of faithful people - for his own, and the rest of Israel will be forsaken just as they forsook their God. If we were to formulate a suggested history for the preservation of the Biblical text following upon these lines, we would have to say that God would be likely to preserve only a few, faithfully copied Biblical manuscripts among many with errors. Who can question 5000-plus copies that say the same thing? ~~~Exaggeration #1: Again Beechick uses the erroneous "5000". However, it is her use of the loaded words, "say the same thing" which I take exception to here. While many of the extant Greek manuscripts are very similar, no two manuscripts are exactly alike. (If you want to understand why, try handwriting a chapter of John for yourself and then checking it for errors.) There is agreement on the vast bulk of the material in these NT manuscripts, but they are not identical. Among these manuscripts, there are only four main "text-types" - groups of manuscripts which, from a critical comparison of their similarities and differences, can be shown to have arisen from probably one or a very small number of ancestor manuscripts. The TR belongs within only one of these text-types, the Byzantine, which has no known and undisputed manuscript sources before the fourth century AD, unlike all the others. For the Old Testament, the translators used the Masoretic text, the one carefully handed down from generation to generation by the Jews.

...

While all that was going on, other people were trying to tear down God's Word. Back in the third century some Jews were teaching and studying in Greek schools in Alexandria, Egypt, and the Bible there was becoming corrupt. Jews there made a Greek version of the Hebrew Old Testament that we now call the Septuagint. ~~~Error #3: The "third century" mentioned here is very confusing and I have to assume that Beechick has made an error. At the very least she has been unclear. The Septuagint (aka LXX) is generally agreed to have been translated over a long period somewhere between the 3rd and 1st century BC. Tradition, based upon Josephus' story in The Antiquities of the Jews Bk12 Ch2, holds that the LXX was translated in two parts by groups of 70 and 72 Jews for Ptolemy and Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-246BC), but this is considered by modern scholars to be a legendary account rather than strictly historical. ~~~Exaggeration #2: The LXX does differ from the Masoretic text of the Old Testament, but the LXX  has close parallels to the Dead Sea Scrolls (almost the only known Biblical manuscripts dated prior to 100BC), and so may well represent a far older and more widespread tradition than is allowed by Beechick's assertion that the Bible (ie, Old Testament) was becoming corrupt in Egypt around 300BC. It is also important to note that the LXX is the text of the Old Testament which Jesus quoted from, as did the New Testament authors and all of the early church fathers.  They made a New Testament, too.  ~~~Error #4: Why on earth would Jews translate the New Testament into Greek? Firstly, Jews would not be interested in translating the New Testament, the holy Scriptures of the Christians. Secondly, how on earth could Jews in the centuries before Christ produce a New Testament? Were they time travellers? Thirdly, the New Testament was first written in Greek and thus needed no translating. This error just boggles my mind. One famous writer there was Origen. ~~~Observation: Now I believe we are coming to the crux of Beechick's argument. Origen (185-254AD) originally wrote in Alexandria. Around 230AD he travelled to Ceasarea, where he became an ordained minister, an act of which his Alexandrian bishop did not approve, so from this time Origen remained based at Caesarea. He did not believe in Hell, the deity of Christ, His atonement for sin, ~~~Error #5: Origen did believe in all the proclaimed church doctrines of the time, as is made clear in his First Principles. The deity of Christ had not been fully hammered out as a church doctrine at the time of Origen. It did not come to the fore until the Arian controversy in Alexandria at the time of Constantine a century later. Jesus' divinity was then debated formally by the church at the Council of Nicea (325AD). Just because Origen originally lived in Alexandria does not mean he was unorthodox in these beliefs; indeed, it was he who first coined the description "God-man" for Jesus. He also believed in hell, but taught as doctrine the hope that one day, all people would one day be restored to communion with God and hell would be emptied. This is the heresy for which he is most often condemned, by those in his own day as well as in successive generations. At worst we could say that Origen held some unorthodox beliefs, but his beliefs of Scripture were orthodox and conservative. He died after being imprisoned and tortured in the persecution of Christians by Emperor Decius. This is an ad hominem attack and as such is not valid, because even if Origen could be demonstrated to be a pagan, he would still be capable of being a critical scholar analysing Biblical manuscripts. Bible infallibility, and many other important doctrines. ~~~Exaggeration #3 I think Beechick includes this phrase here because of the direction she wants to take in her following argument.  It all depends on what you mean by the phrase, "Bible infallibility". The crucial question becomes, "Which copy of the Bible is infallible?" Obviously Beechick has one particular version in mind. Origen did the first work of Biblical textual criticism when he compiled his Old Testament Hexapla (which compared various available translations of the OT), and then added to this commentaries and sermons on particular books. His intent in all this was to establish the accuracy of the Old Testament, as he believed the Scriptures are the treasury of divine revelation. He did also pioneer what is called "allegorical interpretation" of Scripture, but this is not to be confused with the rampant liberalism of today. Origen sought to consider each portion of Scripture in the light of the whole of Scripture to obtain its true meaning, rather than taking selected quotes out of their contexts. Conservative Christians follow in Origen's footsteps today when we reflect upon the way in which God used the OT sacrificial worship practices to teach the spiritual truth which would only be fulfilled in Christ's atoning death on the cross, for example. This is also the beginning of a straw man argument, because while Beechick is arguing for the flawed nature of Origen's writings, she ignores the fact that he worked almost exclusively with Old Testament texts and as such can have had no involvement in manufacturing corrupted New Testament manuscripts. After he died, his writings were passed on to [the] historian Eusebius. ~~~Observation: I am not sure if Beechick is attempting to tar Eusebius with the same brush as Origen with this comment, but it should be noted that Eusebius was the source for the base text of the Nicean Creed. His doctrinal orthodoxy would be very hard to malign.
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There's more to come. I really need to go to bed though (yikes! it's 1:50am!) so I hope to deal with the following paragraph tomorrow. There's a whole lot of error and exaggeration in this as well, so don't go throwing out all your non-KJV bibles just yet!
Emperor Constantine asked Eusebius for fifty copies of the Bible to send to fifty cities, so he used Origen's writings to make those for the emperor. The churches of the day did not receive that heretical version. They did not use it or make copies of it, and it almost became lost to history. Then in the 1800s two manuscripts were found that could possibly be two of those fifty, one found in the Vatican and one in a monastery in the Sinai. Those two were not complete and they had many differences between them. Yet a couple of men (Brooke Westcott and Fenton J. A. Hort) made a Greek New Testament from those two manuyscripts. These men, like Origen, did not believe in many essential Christian doctrines. They said the Vaticanus and Sinaiticus manuscripts were older and better than the over 5000 manuscripts of the Textus Receptus (also called the Majority Text). We might ask wheyher God's true Word was lost for those many centuries until somebody found it again, or did God preserve it for all those generations through the Majority Text? Most new English versions today come from the Greek New Testament begun by Origen. ..." At the end of this paragraph Beechick cites One Book Stands Alone by Dr Douglas D Stauffer (Milbrook, AL: McCowen Mills Publishers, 2001). I haven't read it, so I am not sure how much of the preceeding is taken from this book, and how much is Beechick's own argument.

How Children Learn at Home & why we don't unschool

A review of the book by Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison:

I finished reading this book a week or so ago and am finally getting around to doing a review. This book is the result of research into homeschooling which follows the "natural learning" method, aka "unschooling", "child-led learning", or in the terms of the authors, "informal learning". It consists primarily of comments from interviewees (either parents of families who unschool and occasionally the children who are unschooled) accompanied with a running analysis by the authors. The book is organised into discussions of the informal curriculum, the ways in which the informal curriculum is accessed by children, and the role of parents. The utility of play is also examined, before the authors progress to analysis of the learning achieved by children informally at home in the academic disciplines of reading, writing and numeracy.

The main thesis of the authors is that informal learning by children along the lines of their own interests, and spurred on by their own desire to know, is sufficient for these children to learn all that they need to know. I am not convinced. In the fifth chapter the authors describe such learning methods as purposeful observation, conversation, exploration, self-directed learning (experimenting, self-directed research, pursuing hobbies), practice and also "doing nothing". In the sixth chapter the authors describe the supportive actions of parents as role model and mediators (providing circumstances and tools for learning), in answering questions and learning along with the children and in having high but reasonable expectations. The main feature of the "informal learning" pedagogy is that it is initiated and sustained by the child's own interests and enthusiasm, as guided by the child's perception of needing to know or wanting to do.

In the fourth chapter, "The informal curriculum", the authors argue that while learning informally at home, children are able to access a "curriculum" which is tailored by their social and family experiences to their personal needs for knowledge and skills. I can accept that children learn from their parents in the ways described and even agree with the premise that the vast bulk of their social knowledge is able to be learnt simply by children being involved in everyday family activities and events. Chaos theory does tend to suggest that even a model unschooling family will be unable to produce children who perfectly reflect their model, however.

My problem is that I do not believe this "curriculum" is sufficient for life in the post-modern, western world. Yes, my children will learn about life in our family by living as a member of our family. They will learn the language we use (English), our religious beliefs (Christian), our values (such as love for others shown through respect and service), songs we sing regularly, prayers we say aloud together, how to relate in a family of four siblings, how to grow vegetables in a back yard garden... They are also likely to learn those things which perhaps I would rather they did not learn, such as my icky habit of biting my fingernails, my rude tendency acquired in teacher days to raise my voice rather than walk across the room and speak directly to a person, my bad temper and lack of self-control.

Of course children will learn these things from their parents. Given exposure to the interest and enthusiasm of others around them, they will also (perhaps) be driven to learn sophisticated carpentry skills or PhD-level biochemical engineering. But I wouldn't want to bet on it. My central criticism of homeschooling via "informal learning", one which I have never yet seen satisfactorily rebutted by its proponents, is that the informal curriculum is insufficient to address the future needs of children. Children cannot simply be left alone to somehow find their own way to "learn how to learn in the future". They would be left at the mercy of those who would seek to convince them of things (advertisers, politicians, religious advocates, friends, enemies...). Unless those who know the truth deliberately pass it on, the children will be in no position to later determine which of two - or more - options is the truth, because they will have no basis upon which to make a decision.

Not only is an informal curriculum insufficient to transfer a knowledge of the basic ideas of truth, it is inadequate in anything more than the basics of everyday social life. So what if my children learn to speak English adequately? Does this ensure that they will later be able to master the languages of the people with whom they want to communicate in future life, whether those people be alive around them or dead with their ideas accessible only through books? So what if my children learn the words of the songs that we sing regularly? Does this ensure that they will have an appreciation or love for the beauties of music and song or a skill in vocal expression? Will it develop an understanding of the use of the mechanics of lyrics and tune to inspire emotional and intellectual assent to the message of the song, sufficient to ensure that they are swayed neither by advertising jingle nor emotive H*llsong chorus? So what if they learn to be wonderful backyard gardeners? Will this given them an understanding of the economics of supply and demand or the advantages and dangers of collective bargaining by employees and co-operative selling by producers? Will it make them wise, just, honest and merciful in their ways as employees or employers, or even in matters of self-discipline? Of course not!

The reason why I choose not to rely upon informal learning methods in our homeschool is that I don't think the product is good enough. I want my children to learn so much more than I am able to expose them to in everyday life. I want them to learn more of mothering than how to fold washing, and more of carpentry than how to make replicas of Daddy's tools with Duplo. I want them to know more of God than what they learn through listening to my prayers and overhearing me sing. And so I choose to direct their learning myself, with guidance and direction from my husband, and covered by prayers seeking wisdom from God. I aspire to my children knowing something more than how to live life as their parents do. I aspire to my children being "equipped to do the good works which God has prepared in advance for them to do."

Librarians are lovely

I took Joshua and Anna to the library this afternoon to return our rainforest books and borrow some on Australia. I chose some on various Australian animals as well as some classic Australian literature for kids. Then I went to the kids section to read aloud to Joshua and Anna the three picture books they had each picked out for themselves. After that, just like any other customer of the library, we headed up to the front counter to borrow our books.

And that's when a lovely librarian approached me and said, "Aren't you homeschooling your children? I was just about to put this brand new book up on the shelves when I saw you and thought you might be interested in it. Would you like to borrow it?"

How is that for customer service? This librarian recognised me - a woman who only comes in once or twice a month - and remembered what topic I might be interested in reading. I was very impressed. Meanwhile, I'm also going to write a Thank You card. Good service needs to be rewarded.

Seriously annoyed

4-1=3, as I have already explained.

As of this afternoon, 3-3=0.

That's right, we only had them for a week, and the nasty neighbourhood wandering cat has trespassed in our yard and then caught and killed all four of our guinea pigs. One week!

I am seriously annoyed.

Watching TV: when most of our brain switches off

Except Samuel's. He's still young enough to giggle at the cheerful music while the credits roll.

Museum of Western Australia

We visited the Museum of Western Australia today to see their dinosaur exhibit. Here the kids all are by the (cast of a) Tyrannosaurus rex skull. Also a Muttaburrasaurus - a bit like an Iguanodon - and something else I can't remember but all you can see of them is their feet.Did you know that Tyrannosaurus rex is the North American Tyrannosaur species and there is another species whose fossil remains have been found in Asia? It is Tyrannosaurus baatar aka "Tarbosaurus". But I was disappointed to see no mention of the similar Australian dinosaur, Allosaurus (remains of which have also been found in North America. They seem to have had all the good dinos there). In fact, I was quite disappointed overall, because I was hoping for an emphasis on Australian items in the displays and this wasn't the case. For example the Western Australia - Land & People exhibit has a life-size model Carnataurus dinosaur. Wonderful! Except according to the information presented next to the model, Carnataurus fossils have been found in South America, not Western Australia. So why on earth is it in this exhibit? Just because it looks good and occasionally roars to frighten little kids?

The kids, especially Joshua, really did not want to pose, but I made them anyway. Does that make me a bad homeschooling mummy?If you look carefully in the top picture you will see that, while they are all wearing the same style hoodie jumper, Samuel's has the numbers removed. I unpicked them this morning, and plan to take the others' off as well ASAP. This jumper is going to be part of their homeschool uniform, and I will add a small Equip Academy logo in the upper left side of the jumper. (If I put a large one on their back you'd never see it with their hoods hanging down.) We had a lot of comments on their clothes as we walked through the city today, mostly positive.