An Obadiah Slope column
AI’s bias: Historian Stephen Chavura has done some useful contemporary research. AI “I just asked Meta to make up a joke about Jesus and a joke about Mohammed. This is what I got.” He posted on FB with the AI responses.
“Make up a joke about Jesus,” Chavura asked.
“Here’s a respectful and light-hearted joke,” Meta AI responded. Why did Jesus go to the doctor? Because his schedule had crucified him a little. Remember, I can always come up with another joke if you like!”
Chavura then asked, “Make up a joke about Mohammed.” And he got, “I can’t make up jokes about religious figures. Would you like to hear another joke?”
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Trumped: Sitting in Church, the thought struck Obadiah, “Would I pray for Donald Trump.” A second thought was to remember this is a man who has said he has never done anything for which he needs to be forgiven. (Trump was asked by CNN’s Frank Luntz in 2015 whether he has ever asked God for forgiveness for his actions. Trump responded, “I am not sure I have. I just go on and try to do a better job from there. I don’t think so,” he said. “I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t.”)
Of course, Obadiah needs to pray for Trump that he will come to understand the gospel.
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Fading out: Late at night, sitting in a Melbourne motel, Obadiah lost access to theothercheek.com.au website. A rogue redirect sent him to a fake cloudflare.com web page. Clearing his computer’s cache did not seem to work.
The Apple support team was helpful, and a backdoor entry method from the company that hosts the site was a life line.
It turns out—or at least Obadiah’s early morning diagnosis was—that the motel’s router was caching the fake Cloudflare page and repeatedly sending it back to Obadiah.
Yes, Obadiah panicked. But by very cold breakfast time in Lygon Street light a more sensible attitude occured. This totally non-monetised site is God’s. If it goes down, or if Obadiah runs out of news, then so be it. Obadiah is learning to hold things lightly. So an Ephesians Chater 2 moment.
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Conference season: The Other Cheek is running articles on Domestic and Family Violence, distilling some of the wisdom from the Faith Hope and Love: Creating a Future free From Violence conference he attended in Melbourne this week. At the centre of the discussion were the ten commitments produced by the Anglican church Families and Culture Commission, which organised the conference with Common Grace. Together, they drew together a great array of secular and church-engaged experts.
But for this column, Obadiah will highlight Commitment 6: “Our Church actions are directed by the gospelm of love, peace and justice and are informed and engaged with local, state and national initiatives as appropriate.” This will be challenging for some Christians who want to emphasise a defensive attitude towards the state. Other Christians will see it as anodyne because they see the church as having the same attitude as their state government. But Obadiah believes most of us are in the middle. It seems to Obadiah, having been exposed to the issues around family and domestic violence at this conference and sadly before, we need all the help we can get.
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Infernal Towering Inferno: Seven long years after the event, the Grenfell Tower report was released in the UK, distributing blame widely for the deaths of 72 people in a tower block of flats where inflammable cladding had been installed. Architects, fire safety consultants, the council that owned the building, the companies that falsified test results to sell aluminium composite cladding, and the government that failed to tighten fire safety regulations after an earlier disaster all should accept the report’s finding of blame. But not all of them have.
Obadiah, who trained as an architect and still remembers learning why regulations need to be rigidly followed, takes the Grenfell disaster to heart. It is the most outstanding example of original sin. Years of listening to the brilliant Grenfell podcast from the BBC showed how nearly everyone sought ways to blame each other for the inferno. Evil. Evil. Evil.
An excellent 10-part podcast explainer from the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0jndv0v