A Place to Stand | April 2021
Everybody worships something | Starting from home | When the voice of conscience is a monotone | Miscarriage, bereavement, and employment law
Everybody worships something
Traditional faith is in decline, but it’s being replaced by “religion without religion”
Richard Dawkins, scourge of believers and self-proclaimed ‘bright’, is getting religious in his old age. He recently tweeted, “Science’s truths were true before there were societies; will still be true after all philosophers are dead; were true before any philosophers were born; were true before there were any minds, even trilobite or dinosaur minds, to notice them.” As re-tweeters pointed out, this all sounds rather familiar to anyone schooled in the Christian faith. Here’s the opening to the book of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” Although John’s Gospel lacks the important qualification about trilobite minds, both texts invoke a more or less mystical sense of something beyond us and bigger than us, something that might even be sacred. Dawkins would no doubt be outraged by the comparison, but I think it tells us something important about the nature of religion and belief and the way they’re expressed in many societies now. Continue reading
Starting from home
Part II of our epic journey through Roger Scruton’s “How to be a Conservative”
Where are you most fully yourself? Where are you most truly known and accepted, despite your flaws and failings? Where are you most likely to give and receive gifts, to sacrifice, and to share? For most of us, the answer is: when we are at home. Home is the place we belong, where we first encounter the world and learn what it means and how we should act in it. Home is where we learn who we are, as we see ourselves reflected in the people tied mostly closely to us. To make and inhabit a home is one of the most basic human instincts. It’s also a good metaphor for starting to understand conservative thought. Continue reading
When the voice of conscience is a monotone
Recent US research, and NZ experience, suggests universities need to do more to encourage free speech and critical thinking.
Universities have a special role—or at least, they’re supposed to. The Education and Training Act tells us that universities “accept a role as critic and conscience of society.” Their “principal aim” is “to develop intellectual independence” and they are to be “characterised by a wide diversity of teaching and research.” These are noble ideals, designed to help in the search for truth, the wellbeing of society, the development of active, inquiring minds. But what happens when the voice of this conscience becomes a monotone? Continue reading
Miscarriage, bereavement, and employment law
Our parliamentarians have done something genuinely kind
“I can vividly remember the day, nearly six years ago, when I drove to work on an otherwise ordinary morning, sat in the car park staring at the dashboard for around 10 minutes, then drove away again without getting out. Less than 24 hours earlier … a radiographer had kindly but matter-of-factly told us that there was no heartbeat in my wife’s womb …” That was the beginning of an article I wrote a couple of years ago, sharing my experience with miscarriage and expressing support for a law change that would grant bereavement leave to women and their spouses and partners who experience a miscarriage or a still-birth. Last week, Parliament passed the Holidays (Bereavement Leave for Miscarriage) Amendment Bill and made this change a reality. Continue reading