Earning a Big Mac in the land of the "fair go"

This point of this post is NOT that Australia is better than the USA.
The point is that Australia and the USA are very different countries.
On the one hand,  both countries are democratic, capitalist, English speaking, and former English colonies. But they have different histories and very different values about equity, economic freedoms, and government responsibilities. One effective way to see some of the cultural differences is to watch the iconic Australian movie The Castle with a mixed group of Australians and Americans. Most Australians think it is hilarious and the Americans just don't get it.

I believe there is one economic statistic which clearly illustrates some of the fundamental differences between the two countries. The legal minimum wage is currently about 2.5 times higher in Australia than in the USA. In concrete terms, someone working at McDonald's in the USA has to work twice as long as an Australian employee to buy their lunch.

Here, are some of the details. The Federal minimum wage in the USA is currently US$7.25 per hour. Americans may find interesting reading the Australian National Employment Standards (enshrined in law under the  Fair Work Act of 2009).
The minimum wage has just been increased to AU$589 per week.
The maximum number of working hours is 38 hours week.
[Also, the "casual loading" has been increased to 22%. I believe this is what you pay people who do not have long term positions with super-annuation, paid annual leave, and other "benefits".]
I calculate the corresponding hourly pay rate is  AU$18.90 per hour ($589/38 x  1.22).

What about comparing currencies and costs of living? The US$ and A$ fluctuate relative to on another but are currently comparable.
The Big Mac index data from July 2010 list the price of a McDonald's Big Mac in Australia as A$4.35 versus US$3.73. This illustrates how the purchasing powers of the two currencies are comparable.

What might we learn from all this?

• Australia is a very egalitarian country. ["A Fair Go for all"]
• Australia is a very prosperous country.
• Perhaps, a significant increase in the minimum wage in the USA would not lead to the economic disaster predicted by some business leaders and conservative politicians.

Religion leads to war

Last night, my wife and I watched Elizabeth: the Golden Age. Overall the movie is very nicely done and worth watching. Again there is the usual issue in such a "historical " movie about historical inaccuracies. It is interesting that Cate Blanchett said:

"It's terrifying that we are growing up with this very illiterate bunch of children, who are somehow being taught that film is fact, when in fact it's invention. Hopefully though an historical film will inspire people to go and read about the history. But in the end it is a work of history and selection."

To me the movie clearly illustrates the danger of religion and the associated self-righteous "God is on our side" approach to politics and life. It is also fascinating how in the movie Queen Elizabeth (the Protestant) seeks the counsel of an astrology.

I dislike most movie trailers because they are so brief, so overly dramatic and contain a randomly ordered juxtaposition of scene flashes. However, I really like the extended trailer below.

What is justice?

In 1843 General Charles Napier conquered Sind and installed the order of British colonial rule, no doubt to bring the blessings of civilization to the "inferior races". When the British came, one of the colonial impositions they instituted was the prohibition of sati - of widows being cremated on their husbands' funeral pyres. They were shrewd enough to tolerate a number of native peculiarities, but not the burning of widows. The Brahmans of Sind, however, defended sati as an age-old custom. General Napier's response was as simple as it was arrogant: "My nation also has a custom. When men burn women alive, we hang them. Let us all act according to national custom!" 

Sometimes this story is told as a polemical tool to underline the clear moral superiority of certain practices over others. It is possible, however, to see it as an extreme case of competing, indeed clashing, justices...

Miroslav Volf begins his chapter on Oppression and Justice in Exclusion and Embrace with this story. It certainly got my attention!

One mans justice is another man's (or woman's) injustice. Volf reviews three dominant ways of dealing with the issue of clashing justices

• the universalist affirmation that there is just one justice 
• the postmodern claim that there are a rich plurality of justices; they all need to be embraced
• the communitarian approach of placing justice within a tradition (Alasdair MacIntyre)

But, to the Christian the very character of the tri-une God and the gospel defines justice. (See for example Romans 3:25-26. This is my emphasis, not Volf's. Also, note that justice and righteousness are interchanged in different translations; but that underscores the point).

So shouldn't that make it all clear? Christian's should go for the first option above. But, Volf goes on (p. 198):

the argument from the character of God to universal justice and universal peace is incontrovertible. To be a follower of Jesus Christ means both to affirm that God's justice transcends all cultural construals of justice and to strive for that justice (Matthew 6:33)....

The question is whether Christians who want to uphold God's universal justice can judge between cultures with divine infallibility. The answers is that they cannot.  

For one, Christians stand inside a culture, inside a tradition, inside an interest group. Unlike God's Knowledge, their knowledge is limited and distorted. There judgements about what is just in concrete situations are inescapably particular. We must therefore distinguish between our idea of God's justice and God's justice itself.

This is quite humbling and should check us before we start off on some of our self-righteous rants about "injustices" we have experienced.... But it does seem to me there may be less ambiguity about issues we are less directly involved in...

I will try and summarise later Volf's proposals of possible ways forward.

Communicating love to children

My wife and I have found one of the most helpful parenting books is How to Really love your child by Ross Campbell. I was asked to review it at church on sunday. Here is the executive summary which I used.

Previously I mentioned Campbell's  latest book, Help your Twentysomething get a life and get it now! It raises some important questions about how our western affluence combined with our desire to take care of our [adult] children is actually hurting them (and us). My wife and I thought it was so helpful we have bought multiple copies so we can are give them to our peers.

The limitations of analogy in science and theology

Analogues have great value in helping us better understand difficult concepts. However, they do have limitations, and understanding those limitations can be helpful too. No analogy is perfect and if pushed too far can become problematic. In his chapter on Salvation in Theology: The Basics Alister McGrath points out this limitation and illustrates it with the notion of Jesus paying a "ransom" through his death (see Mark 10:45). The analogy is powerful because it illustrates that we were hostages to our sin without hope of freedom. Jesus death and resurrection liberates us. But if we push the analogy too far we start to get bogged down in questions such as "To who was the ransom paid? Who was the hostage taker who received the ransom payment: God or the Devil?".

Analogues have their value and limitations in science too. A famous and historically important one was that of the aether. In 1865 James Clerk Maxwell proposed that light is an electromagnetic wave analogous to a sound wave travelling through a solid or gas (a medium). But this analogy requires that there must be some medium in which the light wave is travelling. This medium was called the aether and Maxwell proposed it was a "sea of molecular vortices", which he sketched below.

Physicists searched for this new medium in vain. Eventually Michelson and Morley performed experiments that showed such a medium could not exist. Light waves travel in a vacuum. The analogy was helpful but limited.

N.T. Wright on the Atonement

This morning my son and I are discussing the chapter on Salvation in Alister McGrath's Theology: The Basics. A key issue is the nature of the atonement and the question of penal substitution. This led me to read an interesting (but rather long) article The Cross and its Caricatures by N.T. Wright which addresses some controversies in the U.K. in 2007. Below I have extracted a few paragraphs that I found helpful and challenging and are independent of the context in which the article was written.

I am one of those who think it good that the church has never formally defined 'the atonement', partly because I firmly believe that when Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn't give them a theory, he gave them a meal. Of course, the earliest exponent of that meal (Paul, in 1 Corinthians) insists that it matters quite a lot that you understand what you are about as you come to share in it; ....

Robert Jenson's .... main point is that standard theories of atonement (of how, in other words, Jesus' death effected our reconciliation with God) have located the cross within conceptualities and narratives other than the biblical one, to which the gospel writers and Paul all point as the proper matrix for understanding the event ('Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures'). Anselm cut the cross loose from its scriptural moorings and placed it within a feudal system of honour and shame; Abelard, within a story of a divine teaching programme; the Greek Fathers, within the world of mythical satanic powers. None of these is without biblical resonance, but equally none grapples with the actual story the biblical writers tell, and the way in which the gospel writers in particular present the meaning of Jesus' death primarily through a narrative, a narrative which offers itself not just as an echo of bits and pieces of the ancient scriptures of Israel but as the continuation of that story and the bringing of it to its climax.

..... The biblical doctrine of God's wrath is rooted in the doctrine of God as the good, wise and loving creator, who hates - yes, hates, and hates implacably - anything that spoils, defaces, distorts or damages his beautiful creation, and in particular anything that does that to his image-bearing creatures. If God does not hate racial prejudice, he is neither good nor loving. If God is not wrathful at child abuse, he is neither good nor loving. If God is not utterly determined to root out from his creation, in an act of proper wrath and judgment, the arrogance that allows people to exploit, bomb, bully and enslave one another, he is neither loving, nor good, nor wise.....

Miroslav Volf. In his magisterial Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), he demonstrates, with sharp examples from his native Balkans, that it simply won't do, when faced with radical evil, to say, 'Oh well, don't worry, I will love you and forgive you anyway.' That .... is not forgiveness; it is belittling the evil that has been done. Genuine forgiveness must first 'exclude', argues Volf, before it can 'embrace'; it must name and shame the evil, and find an appropriate way of dealing with it, before reconciliation can happen. Otherwise we are just papering over the cracks. As I said early on, if God does not hate the wickedness that happens in his beautiful world, he is neither a good nor a just God, and chaos is come again.   ......the problem which Anselm already identified: you have not yet considered how serious sin is. It isn't that God happens to have a petulant thing about petty rules. He is the wise and loving creator who cannot abide his creation being despoiled. On the cross he drew the full force not only of that despoiling, but of his own proper, judicial, punitive rejection of it, on to himself. That is what the New Testament says. That is what Jesus himself, I have argued elsewhere, believed what was going on. That is what the classic Anglican formularies and liturgy say.....

Sadly, the debate I have reviewed .... shows every sign of the postmodern malaise of a failure to think, to read texts, to do business with what people actually write and say rather than (as is so much easier!) with the political labelling and dismissal of people on the basis of either flimsy evidence or 'guilt by association'. We live in difficult times and it would be good to find evidence of people on all sides of all questions taking the attitude of the Beroeans in Acts 17, who 'searched the scriptures daily to see if these things were so', instead of 'knowing' in advance what scripture is going to say, ought to say, could not possibly say, or must really have said (if only the authors hadn't made it so obscure!).

Public sin requires public confession and repentance

Last weekend my wife and I watched the movie Frost/Nixon. It is a "historical recreation" of the background to the famous interviews that David Frost did with Richard Nixon in 1977, a few years after Nixon had been forced to resign as the President of the USA because of the Watergate scandal. It is certainly worth watching.

I thought the portrayal of Nixon was excellent but not of Frost. I had not appreciated how Nixon was such a "charmer" or his talent for obfuscation. The movie portrays Frost as a superficial smiling glamour boy but if you watch the original interviews or the interview of Frost by Mike Wallace (CBS 60 minutes) I think he had more substance.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This includes corruption of the critical faculties so one becomes delusional about what is actually right and wrong. This is highlighted by Nixon's classic claim: "When the president does it that means that it is not illegal".

The movie also made me appreciate what a wounding experience Watergate was for the American people. Many desperately wanted Nixon to clearly confess that he did the wrong thing, broke the law, and to apologise for it. Nixon also wanted public redemption, but on his own terms of self justification. Public sin requires public confession and repentance. Unfortunately, Nixon never clearly did that.