Perfect month of May
Cool mornings at the playground
Summer is too hot
Cool mornings at the playground
Summer is too hot
(It was meant to be about something I hate. But I couldn't be bothered to do a haiku for something I don't like!)
Tuesday, 16 August 2011
Monday, 15 August 2011
All the rest have 31...
Anyone else here a big fan of December?
Now chances are you are either cheering or staring at the screen in frank incredulity. December! Christmas! Preparing for Christmas! Woohoo! Or alternatively: December? Time of frantic Christmas shopping and big Christmas and New Year get-togethers where someone is sure to end up in St Mungo's with a satsuma or walnut up his or her nose? Stress on earth and ill will to all men!
Be that as it may, I love it.
I love the fairy lights on the houses. They make up for the dark mornings and evenings. People here don't go in for the different colours so much, just the starry white ones. Beautiful.
I love the anticipation of the first snowfall on our balcony, as we watch the snowline moving further and further down our mountain.
I love preparing for Christmas. I even love planning how we're going to prepare for Christmas (which admittedly happens in November but never mind).
I love doing Bible readings and lighting candles and having special baking or craft activities with the children all through Advent. Some that we loved last year, and some new ones. If you read on here regularly, you already knew that, because I've posted photos and links for the last two winters.
I love December food. When I was little we always had hot-chocolate-with-candy-canes as one of our special Advent treats. Now one day we have hot chocolate with marshmallows with our little ones, and another day mincepies because they're hard to come by here, and another day a cream tea with strawberry jam and freshly baked scones. I know that's traditionally summer fare in the UK, but December is perfect for baking in a way that summer really isn't here. And of course I love cranberry sauce, stuffing, Christmas cake and Christmas pudding too.
I also love that every year our month-long schedule looks a little different - one bonus of being an expat and the daughter of expats is that we have to travel to two different countries to visit both sets of parents. Which means we can't possibly be expected to do that every year. Which means we can be on a three-year rota - one year here, one in the UK, one in Belgium - and no one will think to complain. (Actually, probably neither his parents nor mine would complain anyway. We're very blessed in that respect). I love that we get to fully take part in three different sets of family traditions because of only being with one (extended) family for the whole Christmas week.
And I love that as a result there's very little, if any, arguing or insertion of satsumas into noses, because we want to make the most of seeing each other while we can. Which in turn means I can look forward to the family reunion without apprehension, and enjoy the whole month of December.
I also like May. But that's another story.
Now chances are you are either cheering or staring at the screen in frank incredulity. December! Christmas! Preparing for Christmas! Woohoo! Or alternatively: December? Time of frantic Christmas shopping and big Christmas and New Year get-togethers where someone is sure to end up in St Mungo's with a satsuma or walnut up his or her nose? Stress on earth and ill will to all men!
Be that as it may, I love it.
I love the fairy lights on the houses. They make up for the dark mornings and evenings. People here don't go in for the different colours so much, just the starry white ones. Beautiful.
I love the anticipation of the first snowfall on our balcony, as we watch the snowline moving further and further down our mountain.
I love preparing for Christmas. I even love planning how we're going to prepare for Christmas (which admittedly happens in November but never mind).
I love doing Bible readings and lighting candles and having special baking or craft activities with the children all through Advent. Some that we loved last year, and some new ones. If you read on here regularly, you already knew that, because I've posted photos and links for the last two winters.
I love December food. When I was little we always had hot-chocolate-with-candy-canes as one of our special Advent treats. Now one day we have hot chocolate with marshmallows with our little ones, and another day mincepies because they're hard to come by here, and another day a cream tea with strawberry jam and freshly baked scones. I know that's traditionally summer fare in the UK, but December is perfect for baking in a way that summer really isn't here. And of course I love cranberry sauce, stuffing, Christmas cake and Christmas pudding too.
I also love that every year our month-long schedule looks a little different - one bonus of being an expat and the daughter of expats is that we have to travel to two different countries to visit both sets of parents. Which means we can't possibly be expected to do that every year. Which means we can be on a three-year rota - one year here, one in the UK, one in Belgium - and no one will think to complain. (Actually, probably neither his parents nor mine would complain anyway. We're very blessed in that respect). I love that we get to fully take part in three different sets of family traditions because of only being with one (extended) family for the whole Christmas week.
And I love that as a result there's very little, if any, arguing or insertion of satsumas into noses, because we want to make the most of seeing each other while we can. Which in turn means I can look forward to the family reunion without apprehension, and enjoy the whole month of December.
I also like May. But that's another story.
Sunday, 14 August 2011
Blog challenge
As I haven't posted for so long, I'm doing a blog challenge organised by my friend L to get me back in the habit of posting. There are prompts and everything.
Today's prompt: Write about a discontinued product that you wish you could still buy.
I can't think of any product I like that has been discontinued (does this mean I'm young? I think so, but my children disagree!) so I'm going to write about something I love but can't get over here.
Sausages.
Yep, I said sausages. But you're in Switzerland, you say, do they not eat sausages there? Could it be that they only like cow-based products, you wonder to yourself. Certainly "Heidi" doesn't really feature pigs.
Let me reassure you that they do have pigs here. And they have many many varieties of something they call sausage (well, saucisse, or Wurst, or whatever the Italian for sausage is). They even have beef sausages. What they don't have is British or Irish sausages. And by that, I mean Walls or Richmonds, the best sausages in the world.
Swiss sausages (and German ones, which are also widely available here), are made of meat, and spices. They can best be described as meaty and, sometimes, as extremely salty. British/Irish sausages on the other hand are made of small amounts of pig meat, and large amounts of spices and bread. They are not meaty, nor inordinately salty. They are delicious, and they are not sold here at all. Not even by the shops who specially import British stuff such as Marmite, Cheddar, or Cadburys. (You may not have thought those things were British, but believe me, they are. Root beer, however, is American.)
So whenever we go back to the UK we make sure my mother-in-law has an ample supply of sausages. And we eat sausages in restaurants, given the option. On occasion we have been known to import a packet of frozen ones with us, in our luggage. (Until we discovered that was illegal. Oops.)
But otherwise we must do without. It is the price we pay for living in this beautiful, frustrating country. And now I hear the sounds of dinner being prepared which creates a suitable if somewhat abrupt end to my post.
Postscript: It turns out we're having sausages. The Swiss kind.
Today's prompt: Write about a discontinued product that you wish you could still buy.
I can't think of any product I like that has been discontinued (does this mean I'm young? I think so, but my children disagree!) so I'm going to write about something I love but can't get over here.
Sausages.
Yep, I said sausages. But you're in Switzerland, you say, do they not eat sausages there? Could it be that they only like cow-based products, you wonder to yourself. Certainly "Heidi" doesn't really feature pigs.
Let me reassure you that they do have pigs here. And they have many many varieties of something they call sausage (well, saucisse, or Wurst, or whatever the Italian for sausage is). They even have beef sausages. What they don't have is British or Irish sausages. And by that, I mean Walls or Richmonds, the best sausages in the world.
Swiss sausages (and German ones, which are also widely available here), are made of meat, and spices. They can best be described as meaty and, sometimes, as extremely salty. British/Irish sausages on the other hand are made of small amounts of pig meat, and large amounts of spices and bread. They are not meaty, nor inordinately salty. They are delicious, and they are not sold here at all. Not even by the shops who specially import British stuff such as Marmite, Cheddar, or Cadburys. (You may not have thought those things were British, but believe me, they are. Root beer, however, is American.)
So whenever we go back to the UK we make sure my mother-in-law has an ample supply of sausages. And we eat sausages in restaurants, given the option. On occasion we have been known to import a packet of frozen ones with us, in our luggage. (Until we discovered that was illegal. Oops.)
But otherwise we must do without. It is the price we pay for living in this beautiful, frustrating country. And now I hear the sounds of dinner being prepared which creates a suitable if somewhat abrupt end to my post.
Postscript: It turns out we're having sausages. The Swiss kind.
Friday, 24 June 2011
Last night we watched the episode of the Daily Show where Jon Stewart talks about Greek public debt being 44,000 per capita, and U.S. public debt being 45,000. Interesting stuff (more interesting to me was that Goldman Sachs helped the Greeks con the EU into letting them into the Euro, which I had not previously realised - is there no end to their iniquity?!)
And the point Jon Stewart was making was of course not that the US is about to collapse whilst throwing yoghurt at policemen, but that the Greeks at least used their debt to do nice things for their people. Like letting them retire at an age that even I, as a European, think is crazy.
However, I had already been wondering how come Greece is falling to bits while the US is actually not doing too badly. So I went and did some research. I typed "debt per GDP Greece" into Google, which was distinctly unhelpful, and then I typed in "debt per capita Greece" and came up with this blog post. Which was much more helpful in that it linked me straight to Wikipedia's list of countries by public debt, which I hadn't thought of trying yet and for some reason Google had not suggested to me!
In brief, it's still rather unconclusive, because although Greece's debt as a percentage of GDP is way nhigher than the US (130% compared to 92%), the US has a way higher debt than Spain (65%) and yet Spain is also having riots about austerity measures. Whereas Japan has way, way higher debt than anyone else (225%!) and is not having any riots at all, as far as I can tell. So that's not the whole story.
As an aside, if you know what the whole story is, please educate me. I'm rubbish at economics. In fact I once failed a very important (to me) interpreting exam because they gave me an economics speech to interpret and I hadn't the faintest idea. (To be fair, if you heard "Bretton Woods" in Spanish and you had never previously heard of Bretton Woods, you would also have a hard time recognising the English words! But the rest was inexcusable).
However, that wasn't my main point. The blog I referenced above had a second link. You can go ahead and read it if you like, I'll wait for you.
Ok. So in case you didn't read it, it takes you through to a Politifact analysis of Jon Stewart's recent statement regarding polls showing that Fox viewers are the most consistently misinformed. They find this statement to be false. However, I'm not convinced. Don't get me wrong here, they may well be right, but I have a slight problem with their methodology. (You may have trouble following my reasoning here if you didn't at least skim the politifact article. Sorry.)
Firslty, they don't specify whether they're responding to "polls show that" or "Fox viewers are consistently misinformed". The article flip-flops back and forth between talking about whether people are misinformed or whether the polls show it. By the time I got to the end, I was fairly clear that polls do not prove anything much one way or the other. I liked what Pew said in the article about not being able to tell what knowledge people had before watching a given news channel, but it rather discredits politifact's use of all the studies named, which focus on whether people have certain specific bits of knowledge or not, to determine how misinformed viewers of a given outlet are. And yet the article in general can and will now be used to show that Fox viewers are not misinformed and viewers of other shows are. So that annoyed me a bit. But fair enough, Jon Stewart was wrong to say that polls consistently show these results.
However, that does not mean that Fox viewers are not the most misinformed (or that they are, either).
But secondly, there's a difference between ill-informed - meaning you've not bothered to become informed, like some of the people in the survey who said they don't watch any (of those) news outlets and could therefore quite reasonably be excluded from the study - and misinformed, which means that someone has received false information.
For instance: who is the current prime minister of Britain?
If you just thought "David Cameron", of course you're right. Unless you are reading this from the Future. :-) If you just thought "um, Gordon Brown?" well, to quote Smaug the dragon: your information is antiquated. So are you misinformed or ill-informed? Well unless someone actually told you this morning that the current PM is Gordon, you're ill-informed. And your news outlet is almost certainly not responsible.
Whereas someone who claims Obama was born in Kenya, because XYZ News says so, is misinformed - they have chosen to believe false information given by a third party. Of course they don't know it's false, otherwise they wouldn't believe it.
As a result, the polls included are flawed - they're not actually about what he said. Or alternatively, what he said isn't what he meant, also a possibility. Quite apart from what I mentioned above about not being able to tell what people already knew from other sources before the news got involved.
My third quibble would be with the inclusion in the studies of the press and radio. Stewart said "viewers". Someone who reads the Financial Times is not a viewer. Neither is someone who listens to BBC Radio4. If your primary source of news is not on TV, you shouldn't really be included. Yet another flaw in the research. But I do understand that Politifact were limited in terms of what existing polls they could use.
However. Surely a reasonably accurate and quick way of finding out whether Fox viewers are the most consistently misinformed is to simply look at Politifact's own database. Which news organisation consistently gives out more information that Politifact rates as "false"? That network's viewers can be considered the most consistently misinformed, whether they choose to believe the misinformation or not. Now this does not count as a poll, presumably, unless each article is based on a poll of other pieces of research, as this particular one was. Or unless you're allowed to count each article as having a yes or no vote to the questions "does Fox/NBC/CNN misinform its viewers?"
An alternative way of deciding who is misinformed - this would not help with the "every poll shows it" aspect however - would be to devise a poll of your own, which would begin with "which news network do you primarily watch?" and perhaps allow you a second choice too, and would continue with such questions as:
Has your primary network ever reported as fact that
- Obama was born in Kenya?
- We found evidence of WMDs in Iraq?
- Saddam Hussein was involved with AlQaeda
- the Republicans want to take us back to Jim Crow laws
- Paul Ryan's medical proposals would allow your insurance to deny you coverage for pre-existing conditions
- Under Obama, the US has doubled its exports
and so on (I took the last three of those from Politifact, which reports them as basically false).
Anyway. There we are. I enjoyed writing this, and while browsing politifact for my final three questions I happened to see that many, many other readers, including one of the polling agencies listed, have in fact written in to Politifact to complain about some of the same issues I raise here. As yet they appear not to have answered these queries, but I daresay they will eventually, and it will be interesting to see what they say.
And the point Jon Stewart was making was of course not that the US is about to collapse whilst throwing yoghurt at policemen, but that the Greeks at least used their debt to do nice things for their people. Like letting them retire at an age that even I, as a European, think is crazy.
However, I had already been wondering how come Greece is falling to bits while the US is actually not doing too badly. So I went and did some research. I typed "debt per GDP Greece" into Google, which was distinctly unhelpful, and then I typed in "debt per capita Greece" and came up with this blog post. Which was much more helpful in that it linked me straight to Wikipedia's list of countries by public debt, which I hadn't thought of trying yet and for some reason Google had not suggested to me!
In brief, it's still rather unconclusive, because although Greece's debt as a percentage of GDP is way nhigher than the US (130% compared to 92%), the US has a way higher debt than Spain (65%) and yet Spain is also having riots about austerity measures. Whereas Japan has way, way higher debt than anyone else (225%!) and is not having any riots at all, as far as I can tell. So that's not the whole story.
As an aside, if you know what the whole story is, please educate me. I'm rubbish at economics. In fact I once failed a very important (to me) interpreting exam because they gave me an economics speech to interpret and I hadn't the faintest idea. (To be fair, if you heard "Bretton Woods" in Spanish and you had never previously heard of Bretton Woods, you would also have a hard time recognising the English words! But the rest was inexcusable).
However, that wasn't my main point. The blog I referenced above had a second link. You can go ahead and read it if you like, I'll wait for you.
Ok. So in case you didn't read it, it takes you through to a Politifact analysis of Jon Stewart's recent statement regarding polls showing that Fox viewers are the most consistently misinformed. They find this statement to be false. However, I'm not convinced. Don't get me wrong here, they may well be right, but I have a slight problem with their methodology. (You may have trouble following my reasoning here if you didn't at least skim the politifact article. Sorry.)
Firslty, they don't specify whether they're responding to "polls show that" or "Fox viewers are consistently misinformed". The article flip-flops back and forth between talking about whether people are misinformed or whether the polls show it. By the time I got to the end, I was fairly clear that polls do not prove anything much one way or the other. I liked what Pew said in the article about not being able to tell what knowledge people had before watching a given news channel, but it rather discredits politifact's use of all the studies named, which focus on whether people have certain specific bits of knowledge or not, to determine how misinformed viewers of a given outlet are. And yet the article in general can and will now be used to show that Fox viewers are not misinformed and viewers of other shows are. So that annoyed me a bit. But fair enough, Jon Stewart was wrong to say that polls consistently show these results.
However, that does not mean that Fox viewers are not the most misinformed (or that they are, either).
But secondly, there's a difference between ill-informed - meaning you've not bothered to become informed, like some of the people in the survey who said they don't watch any (of those) news outlets and could therefore quite reasonably be excluded from the study - and misinformed, which means that someone has received false information.
For instance: who is the current prime minister of Britain?
If you just thought "David Cameron", of course you're right. Unless you are reading this from the Future. :-) If you just thought "um, Gordon Brown?" well, to quote Smaug the dragon: your information is antiquated. So are you misinformed or ill-informed? Well unless someone actually told you this morning that the current PM is Gordon, you're ill-informed. And your news outlet is almost certainly not responsible.
Whereas someone who claims Obama was born in Kenya, because XYZ News says so, is misinformed - they have chosen to believe false information given by a third party. Of course they don't know it's false, otherwise they wouldn't believe it.
As a result, the polls included are flawed - they're not actually about what he said. Or alternatively, what he said isn't what he meant, also a possibility. Quite apart from what I mentioned above about not being able to tell what people already knew from other sources before the news got involved.
My third quibble would be with the inclusion in the studies of the press and radio. Stewart said "viewers". Someone who reads the Financial Times is not a viewer. Neither is someone who listens to BBC Radio4. If your primary source of news is not on TV, you shouldn't really be included. Yet another flaw in the research. But I do understand that Politifact were limited in terms of what existing polls they could use.
However. Surely a reasonably accurate and quick way of finding out whether Fox viewers are the most consistently misinformed is to simply look at Politifact's own database. Which news organisation consistently gives out more information that Politifact rates as "false"? That network's viewers can be considered the most consistently misinformed, whether they choose to believe the misinformation or not. Now this does not count as a poll, presumably, unless each article is based on a poll of other pieces of research, as this particular one was. Or unless you're allowed to count each article as having a yes or no vote to the questions "does Fox/NBC/CNN misinform its viewers?"
An alternative way of deciding who is misinformed - this would not help with the "every poll shows it" aspect however - would be to devise a poll of your own, which would begin with "which news network do you primarily watch?" and perhaps allow you a second choice too, and would continue with such questions as:
Has your primary network ever reported as fact that
- Obama was born in Kenya?
- We found evidence of WMDs in Iraq?
- Saddam Hussein was involved with AlQaeda
- the Republicans want to take us back to Jim Crow laws
- Paul Ryan's medical proposals would allow your insurance to deny you coverage for pre-existing conditions
- Under Obama, the US has doubled its exports
and so on (I took the last three of those from Politifact, which reports them as basically false).
Anyway. There we are. I enjoyed writing this, and while browsing politifact for my final three questions I happened to see that many, many other readers, including one of the polling agencies listed, have in fact written in to Politifact to complain about some of the same issues I raise here. As yet they appear not to have answered these queries, but I daresay they will eventually, and it will be interesting to see what they say.
Saturday, 18 June 2011
Theories about Pottermore, part 2
(Click here for part one)
The Engineer: Pottermore? That's a rubbish name.
Me: Oh?
TE: Potter and more? Rubbish. She must have some reason for picking that ending.
Me: Hmm.....
Two minutes later, I had discovered that Google unhelpfully does not allow you to put a * before a syllable to indicate all words ending in that syllable. It must have some other way of doing this. But Wikipedia does! And typing in "*more" brings up various interesting things.
The first interesting thing I found was Canmore.
Canmore is an online database maintained by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. It contains information on 240,000 archaeological sites, monuments, and buildings in Scotland.
The words in bold are my theories there. No, I don't think JKR is going to provide us with a Harry Potter database. But an encyclopedia is kind of like a database, right? And JKR has been known to refer to her encyclopedia as "the Scottish book" on her website (look under FAQs to find it)
Now, why is Canmore called that? Well, I couldn't find out for sure (leave a comment if you know!) but a strong likelihood is that it is named after two kings of Scotland, and their descendants. The name means Big Head in Gaelic. Evidently in Gaelic you put adjectives second, because it's actually cenn that means head, while mór means big (as in claymore, big sword). Shame, because the name Potterhead (in Gaelic) would be very appropriate for a fansite. However, the name is actually Big Potter - if I'm right that the reference is to Scottish Gaelic, of course. Big Potter could mean just about anything but it would definitely be appropriate for an encyclopedia.
So that's Theory One.
Theory Two is simpler (I think). Lots of towns in the English-speaking world are called something-more. Aviemore, for instance. (Here, the more is still often from the same Gaelic root as before) So Pottermore is Pottertown, so it's a forum-type thing, or possibly an RPG. I would like it to be this because it's more fun for the kids who missed out on the amazing and sadly now-defunct Godric's Hollow rpg, but I would prefer it to be the Encyclopedia because that would be way more interesting for me. And would also mean that maybe the reasoning behind my first theory - a reasoning I haven't seen anywhere else yet - was right.
But whatever it ends up being, I'm grateful to JKR for giving us all the excitement of the wait and the chance to theorise one more time. Thanks Jo!
Theories about Pottermore
Pottermore? That's a rubbish name.
Thus quoth my husband upon hearing of the excitement surrounding J.K.Rowling's newest gift to her fans. But before going further I should explain I came to consider myself a fan of this book series, rather than just an avid reader.
When J.K. Rowling's sixth and seventh Harry Potter books had not yet come out, and I was an unemployed expatriate stay-at-home-mother-to-be, I used to go on an internet forum where we would theorise about the clues JKR might have left for us in the books already written, and try to work out what might happen next. Might Remus Lupin end up with Nymphadora Tonks? Would one of the Weasley family die - and if so, which one? Were Ron and Hermione meant to be, or was that just a distraction from the real Harry-Hermione romance? (In case you're wondering, yes they were, and no it wasn't.) And other, deeper questions as well - of course I don't remember those!
Before joining that forum, which I came across by accident through MuggleNet, I had read the books at face value. They were a good read to pass the time and I loved the references to real mythology (I still can't get over the American publishers' changing the title of the first book to "HP and the Sorcerer's Stone", when there is no such thing as a sorcerer's stone, whereas "the Philosopher's Stone" actually has historical meaning. Tch.) But the New Clues forum gave a new depth to the reading - as well as helping pass the time while my husband was at work! You can only do so much cleaning in one house. Seeing that so many of the clue-based guesses turned out to be right in Book Six got me even more interested. If you don't quite see how that could be a worthwhile way to spend my time, let me ask you this: do you enjoy murder mysteries? If you do, you can probably see that trying to guess before the author tells you is quite compelling, and getting it right can be a kick for someone like me who doesn't drink or do drugs. :-)
Anyway, all of that is in the past now. I made some good online friends through it, developed my critical thinking skills (and conspiracy-seeking skills, most likely!) and generally had a great time. And as a full-time mother of two, I don't miss it, most of the time.
But now, there is Pottermore. What is it? We don't know. We'll find out on the 23rd... which means JKR has once again given us the chance to create wild, inventive, crazy, highly unlikely theories about what is going to happen. Alongside perfectly reasonable, plausible and accurate ones. I'd like to think that my theory, which I will discuss in my next post here, falls in the latter category, but we shall see!
Monday, 13 June 2011
Jesus on heaven and hell?
A dear friend (whose blog I thoroughly recommend) sent me the following words of Jesus in answer to my previous post. You can see her comment there. My reply is below:
Luke 16:19-31:
There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man’s table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.
The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’
But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’
He answered, ‘Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’
Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’
‘No, father Abraham,’ he said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’
He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’
I'm not yet sure whether my friend is making the point that Jesus spoke of heaven vs hell, or some other point. But I'm going to assume the former for the sake of debate. :-)
The interesting thing about this parable is the one thing Jesus does not say but we somehow assume he did:
Jesus does not specify that the rich man was a non-believer, or that the beggar was a believer of any sort. So this division into suffering and rewarded was not done on the basis of faith - at least Jesus doesn't say so. And if he doesn't say so, presumably that wasn't the point of his story.You could of course quite reasonably argue that as Jesus is speaking to a mainly Jewish audience, we can assume that his characters are all Jewish believers too. But even assuming that, we still have a situation where this is not about faith at all.
Now, the character of Abraham does specify that the rich man received good things in his life, whereas the beggar did not. I receive good things in my life. So do you, if you're reading this. So do most Westerners, Christian and non-Christian alike. So is this parable telling us that you and I are going to hell, while many poverty-stricken (non-)Christians in Africa and India will be with Christ (or possibly Abraham) in heaven?
I hope not.
But more on that in a minute, first let's look at a couple of other things.
- It appears that in Jesus' story there could be communication between "heaven" and "hell", which is something that most people's mental version of heaven does not include - the ability to see our loved ones in torment? Or alternatively to see them enjoying themselves, from our own torment? Why does our vision of the afterlife not include these elements?
- What of the verses that state that Jesus went and preached to the souls in captivity, after his death? What was the point of that if, as the character of Abraham says, no one can cross over?
- The parable of the shrewd or dishonest manager almost immediately precedes this one. That's the one in which Jesus appears to recommend acting dishonestly with our boss's funds. Yet we Christians usually have a sense that we should avoid dishonesty in our business dealings. What's the deal here?
The answer is obvious, and of course you're way ahead of me already. Not every detail of a parable is meant to be analogical. Heaven and hell may not be exactly how Jesus describes them, but if the rich man can't see Abraham or talk to him, the story doesn't get to happen. And if Lazarus could cross over, the story might end there, or there would have to be some other reason Abraham couldn't send him, so as to move it along to the final discussion, which is the essence of the parable. Parables are all about the punchline. Jesus' point in the dishonest manager parable is to use our worldly wealth wisely - like the "pagans" do - because it will be of no use to us in the next life otherwise. And in this parable, the issue is not who is rich and who is poor - as Dumbledore might say, who you are is down to your choices, not your circumstance.
So here the clue lies in the final lines about listening to Moses and the Prophets, and, finally: "they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead".
Who is "they"? Well, the wealthy (perhaps powerful) brothers of the rich man. And by extension, the rich/powerful in general.
Convinced of what? Of the existence of heaven/hell? No, because Abraham originally responds that the brothers should listen to Moses and the Prophets, who were distinctly hazy about what happens in the afterlife, but extremely clear on how one should treat others, especially from a position of power. Some of those prophets even specified that the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was in fact oppressing others (check out Isaiah 3) and being "arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy" (Ezekiel 16:49)*
I conclude that this parable is about treating others how God commands, or perhaps about using our wealth to help the poor and needy. Not about what the afterlife looks like, or what happens if you don't believe in Jesus, or even what happens if you are rich (or not). Many non-Christians treat others more like God commands than many Christians do (sadly, I can include myself in this rather damning report). Many non-Christians use their wealth at least as well as "we" do, sometimes better. This parable does not give us any reason to believe that God will shut "them" out of heaven while letting "us" in, because this parable does not mention faith but only *gasp* works.
Finally, we mustn't forget the final punchline, in which Jesus accurately predicts that just as the rich and powerful of his day (and throughout history) didn't listen to Moses or the Prophets, they would also not listen to him, even after his death and resurrection. What did he tell us after his resurrection? Well, interestingly he did not warn us against hell. But you can read it for yourselves in Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, John 20.
In conclusion, this parable does not prove or disprove the existence of a fiery hell for unbelievers. And I hate the idea that there is a clear, visible-to-us in-crowd and an equally clear and visible-to-us bunch of rejects. A "them" and an "us". Something we can use to keep other people away from us, to declare them unclean, not-worthy, less-than. Jesus appears to have felt the same way, based on the company he kept and people he was willing to touch. Which is why I very much like the response given by Brian McLaren recently to a question on the current (post-death) whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden:
(...) I think OBL's destiny is to face the living God who is ultimately and absolutely and beautifully just and loving. (...) Whatever is wrong and evil in OBL will, I believe, be named, exposed, revealed, and dealt with appropriately, in the perfect light of God's justice and love. Whatever remains of God's good image inside OBL will be distinguished from the rest and dealt with appropriately, again in the perfect light of God's justice and love. Whatever from his story can be healed will be healed. Whatever cannot will be dealt with in some other appropriate way. Somehow, grace will have the final word. Somehow, love will win - not at the expense of justice, but through and with and in justice. Beyond that, I have no desire to speculate ... only to live my life in harmony with God's justice and love.
(You can read the whole post at his blog here.)
*The idea that sexual perversion was the main problem in Sodom comes from Jude in the NT - Genesis does talk about them trying to rape the angels who came to see whether their sin was as great as God had heard, but does not say that this was their only sin or even the main one. Even Lot doesn't appear to think that rape is a problem per se, since he offers them his daughters instead, but rather that raping his visitors is inacceptable. Elsewhere in the Old Testament punishment is meted out for raping a woman, so the issue here is not necessarily homosexuality either. This is not particularly reassuring for us, since being arrogant, overfed and unconcerned is just as rampant in Western society as "sexual perversion", if not more so.
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