His ability to act on it is stymied by a completely broken system, but I love the idea that leaders can inspire people to be better versions of themselves, not to win votes by fingering the dirtiest part of them, by pressing the buttons of paranoia. Yes, I say, or provide lesson plans.
To make his point, he holds forth on how to teach schoolchildren about confirmation bias, zipping through about two thousand years of human history in a few sentences. We talk about acting. His latest project is a starring role in The Secret River , an Australian drama about the massacre of Aborigines by European colonists. How does he detach himself from that?
The thing about Australia is that we need to tell stories about frontier conflict in the colonial days. The director thinks I have an inherently friendly face. She wanted someone people would be forced to empathise with, because we as a white society need to own some guilt. I find it hard to talk about. As he signs a card for my childminder — a fan whom he has never met — and draws a picture of an elephant in the card, then gives me a hug goodbye, I feel thoroughly glad that he will never face that situation again.
Christopher Nolan has created a rare thing — an intelligent summer blockbuster. If only the details were as inspiring as the ideas, says Fred Rowson. Nothing to do with a book that you seems to concurrently think is both divine and open to interpretation!
Nothing to do with any of the fools who preach their prejudice in your church. How the hell would you know what God thinks? How simplistic and judgmental! The need to divide things into the false dichotomy of good and evil should remain the intellectual pursuit of pre-enlightenment adults and modern 4 year olds. Many of the most horrific human acts in history have been justified by ill-educated arseholes waving their personal definition of sin. Humans created God.
Humans created the Bible. Humans created our laws. Humans are the source of war and hatred. Humans are the source of love and giving. Humans are the source of morality. If you need a book to tell you what is right, then I am sad for you. Sorry mate. As you should know from my material. Keep this email and read it every now and then. The fact that you presume to do so makes me angry in the same way that if someone tried to pass laws saying Christians have limited rights, I would be angry on behalf of Christians.
I just can. Weird huh? Do you always have to refer to what your dark-ages philosophers thought? Or do you just know? Take some pride in your own ability to act morally. If nature was the result of a chemical reaction and our species has evolved due to natural selection and survival of the fittest then what gives you the right to tell Hitler that what he did was wrong. He may have believed that he was killing off weaker forms of our specie.
What has a crazy Nazi killing people have anything to do with natural selection? A thought on morality for you, and anyone else who think their doctrine is the source of the stuff:. Morality alters over time. You are the type of Christian you are ie reasonably liberal because humans have dragged their religions forward with them. Slavery, witch-burning, genocide and a million other terrible human acts have been justified as supported by the bible.
The reason those things are now seen as immoral is because humankind has advanced. God has nothing to do with it. A prediction: in 50 years, Christians will not accept prejudice against homosexuals and will look back at your generation as misguided and embarrassing. You sure Tom? The simple answer to complex moral questions is to invoke God. I do not claim to have an opinion.
I am presenting you with what I believe comes from the authority of God who made you in his image. He has told us the way we should live our lives and will judge accordingly. Though on that note it is amazing that he does not judge us based on the sins we commit but sends Jesus in our place in order to give us the opportunity to have our sins forgiven. Many comics write about what makes them angry, or, at least, what they observe in the world that is at odds with how they feel it ought to be.
This is the case when Seinfeld talks about muffins or McIntyre talks about Argos brilliantly, I hasten to add. I just happen to be less preoccupied by parking spots and soup nazis, and more by homophobes and creationists. Here in America it seems to be the God stuff that people are coming to see. I don't get to bed until 1. No time to Skype my kids, which is depressing — a digital dad is surely better than a non-dad — but we need to get to the venue early today, as I'm worried about the piano.
Usually we sort out pianos well in advance, but we had a bit of trouble with our planned hire in Dallas. Three days ago, Grizzly received an email from the company who had been booked to supply us with a lovely Baldwin. What a God-hater. So sorry, please cancel the Entire Event In Dallas. It is clear from the use of caps that the writer of this email is a bit of a goose, and I am certainly not suggesting he is a typical Christian, nor a typical citizen of Dallas.
But it's amusing that it happened to be here in Texas that I came across my first proper religious nut. The governor of this fine state is Rick Perry , the Republican presidential frontrunner and a genuine capital-C Conservative — anti-socialist, pro-guns, anti-gay… and yet quaintly enamoured of the aforementioned long-dead Semitic pacifist who said wealth was bad and that you should love everybody. Perry is also a global-warming denialist — once you reject evidence as a source of knowledge, you don't gotta believe nothin' you don't like.
As we drive from airport to theatre, the Dallas sky is vertiginous and blindingly blue and the skyscrapers downtown shimmer with Southern confidence, the kind of self-assurance that also means its citizens can get away with a gallon hat and a moustache without looking like a Village Person. The theatre is a gorgeous Art Deco cinema converted into a concert venue, and the people are lovely… but that's where the positives end.
The instrument brought in to replace God's personal piano is crap, and there's a lovely, shy, but incompetent kid behind the mixing desk. My concerns about security are replaced by frustrations with the frequency of screaming frequencies in crackling fold-back wedges.
If I had a religion, its deity would be Audysseus, the sound God, and He would be a vengeful god, dishing out eternal damnation to people with cheap stage monitors. Happily, I get to leave Grizzly to solve my problems, as a local photographer — hired to take up the challenge of capturing a palatable angle of my ridiculous head — whisks me away to downtown Dallas. His car is shockingly normal-sized and he starts a diatribe against homophobia that segues happily into a searingly negative review of his governor.
He tells me Perry recently organised a "prayer rally" where 30, Texans gathered to ask God for rain. Apart from the fact that government promotion and expenditure for such an event surely constitutes a contravention of America's overtly secular constitution, it also failed to work: more drought and terrible fires appear to have been God's chuckling response.
Later in the evening, struggling like DJ Dante through acoustic hell, I get the giggles during my song "Thank You God For Fixing The Cataracts of Sam's Mum " — a ditty that pokes fun at the megalomaniacal idea that an omnipotent being might have his attention diverted by the plight of a middle-class woman with minor ocular issues.
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