My absence

Sorry for the lack of posts this week, I am in the process of buying and moving into my first house, so time is tight! Between yelling at the solicitor and trying to cram my things into altogether too small boxes, I just can't find time to blog. Hopefully I should have some time on Sunday.

It never did me any harm....

This week's award for moral panic goes to....the opponents of the anti-smacking bill. Many of the bill's opponents give the distinct impression of not even having read it!

Apparently once this bill is made law, our jails will be overflowing with parents thrown into chokey for whacking their kids. As the Select Committee report notes, parents could also technically be prosecuted for kidnapping when they send kids to their bedroom, yet amazingly, this doesnt seem to happen! I cannot imagine the police prosecuting a parent for smacking their child on the backside. As it is, police use their discretion in deciding who to charge. The only concern in my mind is that police might use that discretion to prosecute people against whom they have a particular grudge. It is always concerning when police have wide powers of interpretation over the law, but it is worth remembering that this is possibly unavoidable in such a fraught area.

In any case, the Select Committe report includes a recommendation which would allow parents to use reasonable force in the "normal daily care" of a child. I would expect juries to use such a clause to acquit a parent who lightly smacked a child. Incidentally, the Select Committee also recommended an amendment which would clearly allow physical force used to protect the child, or another person (if the child is about to touch a hot surface, for instance).

Frankly, I think the current situation, in which parents can hit their kids with lumps of wood and other foreign objects, is despicable. Personally, I would rather that parents did not hit their kids. However, this may not always be realistic, and we do not want to see good parents in the dock because o a light smack. This bill is a pretty good compromise I think.

Take a look at Michael's post about billboards. These things are just such an ugly intrusion, and the "free and easy with the facts" campaign run in support of them is further reason to get rid of the damn things!

Religion and politics.

There have been a few bloggings recently which have looked at the intersection of religious and political questions. Michael posted on progressive Christianity, while Span posted on sexual politics and religion.

Personally, I am not religious. I have never seen any reason to believe in the existence of god, at least in the specific forms the major religions claim. Further, I think religion does a lot of harm to good political discourse, and is not helpful in constructing a decent moral code. This post has two main points; to say that it is not possible to be a liberal and a proper Christian, and to say that religion is basically incompatible with pluralistic politics. I am not arguing for a return to conservative Christianity! I am arguing that religion ought to be left out of politics, and preferably disposed of altogether. I have chosen to post about Christianity and politics, mainly because I know more about Christianity than other religions, and to keep the size of this post manageable. I do not think Christianity is any “worse” than other religions in terms of its tolerance or compatibility with politics.

Michael’s post outlined an argument for progressive Christianity. He is absolutely right that this is something which has been sorely lacking from Christian politics in this country. If I had to choose a form of religious politics, progressive Christianity would be it. However, there are a number of problems even with this form of religious politics. While progressive Christianity obviously serves to emphasise the progressive aspects of the religion, it cannot totally downplay the fact that there are many regressive aspects of Christianity. It is still hard to deny that Christianity is not a liberal faith. The Bible still contains views on homosexuality, the death penalty and myriad other things which are violently at odds with those of liberals. Basically I think progressive Christians soft-pedal or ignore the illiberal aspects of their faith. While this is absolutely admirable, and certainly results in a much better form of Christianity from a liberal stand-point, it doesn’t gel at all with traditional Christianity as derived from the Bible (especially the Old Testament). People often focus on the New Testament as part of this change in emphasis. This might help to make Christianity more warm and fuzzy, but it isn’t really honest. The Old Testament is just as much “God’s Word”, and can’t be ignored just because it is inconvenient.

It seems to me, that to be a liberal Christian, you have to ignore an awful lot of the supposed word of god. If you have to ignore so much of his word, it doesn’t speak of a traditional Christianity. In fact, I think that if someone ignores that much of the Bible, and of traditional church practice, it essentially means one has created a new religion, based on liberal politics. This is fine if that is what you want to do, but it seems to me you might as well just own up to being a committed liberal and leave the religious aspect out.

Religion and plurality:
Religion is about dogmatic certainties. People have faith in the revealed certainties of their creator. This is totally at odds with the reality of politics, which is that differing groups and people make compromises with one another. If two different groups have conflicting religious beliefs, they can’t reconcile them without setting religion aside. If you believe God has told you to do A, how could you possibly do C, or agree to do B as a compromise? This suggests two things to me, First, religious people of necessity set their faith aside when acting politically, and second, that it would be better for all concerned if religion were punted out of politics altogether.

TV One Poll

The treatment of these polls to me really does illustrate the utter lameness of political reporting in NZ. The focus on the preferred Prime Minister result is quite baffling. We do not have a system in which we vote directly for the PM, so to attribute any direct significance to the result just seems quite bizarre. It may have some indirect significance, in terms of the impact on party votes, but that is really uncertain.

In general the poll is probably reasonably good news for Labour. Although the Nats have a seven point lead, the trend is for the gap to close, and Colmar Brunton polls always overstate the Nats and understate Labour. At the last election they gave the Nats a six point lead. It seems likely that the two main parties are roughly equal now. The difference of course, is that Labour have a sizeable coalition partner, and are coming off the edn of a very bad year.

Why is it that different polls seem to consistently show certain biases? I don't know much about statistics, but I would be very interested to know why it is that tv3's polls always overstates Labour's support, and vice-versa in tv one polls.

And it just gets better!

Ok, I know Taylor had a fair bit of luck, but what an awesome batting display! Even MacMillan got runs, although he did also manage to get caught twice on consecutive balls. Anyway, it seems that our batting may be starting to come right, and not before time.

Sucks to be Australia

They may not have fielded a full strength team, and it may show poor grace to gloat, and Vincent may have had some chances, but I'm not going to let that rain on my parade!

It was good to see Fleming get more runs, even though he looked pretty patchy at times. It's also good to see Vincent's form continue. So many cricketers seem like arrogant and generally unpleasant characters, whereas Vincent emits a certain earnets keen-ness which makes me want him to do well!

All in all, let's enjoy the victories while they last!