Matthew Henry John Bartlett

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Friday 28 January, 02005

by Matthew Bartlett @ 8:00 am

Europe vs. America [via Deb]
James Howard Kunstler: Cargo Karma
Stuart M: God and dreary evenings
Otago University Professor RH Sibson on the oil production peak
Peace, justice & Christian historians
Poetry and the Sacrament
Art and instinctive response

13 responses to “”

  1. I very much enjoyed the Europe vs. America article, thank you Deb and Matt. This quote particularly got my attention;

    “The West had better stop squabbling and find a way to work together for the common good, because it only has about twenty years left before China (and then India) becomes a great power and the narcissistic minor differences between Europe and America will be lost to view: “In a longer historical perspective, this may be our last chance to set the agenda of world politics.””

  2. And this point was good too:
    “The US television network that recently broadcast a passing glimpse at Janet Jackson’s anatomy was excoriated for its wanton lapse of taste; but the avalanche of accompanying commercials for products designed to enhance male potency passed quite without comment. The female breast, it seems, can rot a nation’s moral core; but malfunctioning penises are wholesome family fare.”

    I’m sorry I have no ideas to add to debate and am just quoting.

  3. Re:1, it came to me that if Kunstler is right and we’re at peak oil production, and cheap oil is the keystone of America’s economy, and China’s economy is built on selling plastic trinkets to America, then it could be a much more confusing future than even that article suggests.

  4. Tim says:

    Kunstler. What an unfortunate name.

  5. Tim says:

    It’s Valentines Day in 18 days.

  6. Aaron says:

    incisive and scintillating comments, Tim.

  7. Alan says:

    IMO the hype about peak oil production is scaremongering by geologists who do not understand what they are dealing with (not that I am claiming to) and subscribe to an evolutionary worldview.

    The theory is that oil has accumulated over millions of years of organic matter burial. Think about how much oil has been pumped out of the ground already – an astronomical amount. Now imagine how much plant matter would need to be buried to form that volume of oil. Where has that come from in only 6000 to 10000 years? Certainly the amount of plant matter buried in the flood is not enough. And then consider the depth at which oil is found at. No other organic material (i.e. coal, etc) has been found at such extreme depths. I am far more inclined to believe the few brilliant geologists who advance a theory that oil is continuously formed at the great depths and pressures at which it is found, from chemicals occurring there. That also resonates far more nicely with an Intellignetly Created earth. Doesn’t it?

  8. Alan says:

    that also happens to explain why abandoned oilfields are ‘filling up’ again with much more credibility than the scaremongerers can.

  9. Hi Alan. It doesn’t resonate with me. In creation I see a theme of overabundance, but always only up to a point. I would be suprised if the world was well-suited to our current oil-hungry, non-frugal, un-careful Western culture.

    Can you reference one of the brilliant geologists?

  10. Alan says:

    The list of proponents begins with Mendelev (who created the periodic table of elements) and includes Dr.Thomas Gold (founding director of Cornell University Center for Radiophysics and Space Research) and Dr. J.F. Kenney of Gas Resources Corporations, Houston, Texas.

  11. Matthew the Baird says:

    Incidentally, current oil obtaination techniques only allow for the removal of circa 30% of the total oil in a well. If more efficient extraction technologies are developed there is still much oil to be had. Im more for hydrogen power

  12. Chris Gousmett says:

    Art and the imagination This article is interesting as it basically supports Seerveld’s approach (taken from Dooyeweerd) that art cannot be explained solely at a linguistic level. A picture is worth more than a thousand words because a picture cannot be reduced to words – it is an entirely different form of expression. So Christians supporting an anti-rationalist, non-reductionist approach to knowledge would recognise that art/images have something different to say than can be expressed in words. However, I disagree with the view that art is experienced intuitively or emotionally as opposed to words which are understood intellectually. Both our linguistic experience and our aesthetic experience are ways of knowing, and knowing is more than “intellectualising” something. It is being acquainted with it, related appropriately to it and responding to it as one creature to another. This “knowledge” of another cannot be reduced to intellectual formulae.

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