Posts Tagged ‘history’

Bribie Island aka 'Bribery' Island

Maddy is going to Bribie Island with her uncle Dave this weekend, and is all excited. She said to Ben “Ben! I need a suitcase to take to Bribery Island!”

So he gave her a knapsack to take to ‘Bribery’ Island, and she began to look through her drawers in her bedroom for clothes to take.

“Hmmm…” she said to herself, “Some of these clothes I got years ago but they still fit because I’m so small… I’ll take that as a compliment to myself!”

Tonight I watched a National Geographic documentary about Armageddon.  It pitted the diehard Bible believers against theologian’s theories about the meaning of the book of Revelation – whether it needs to be taken literally and the end of the world is nigh, or whether it should be taken as a then contemporary text alluding to the Roman/Jewish discord which raged at the time John was committing his wildly psychedelic hallucinations to papyrus, or parchment, or whatever it was he wrote it on.

I tend to lean towards the theologian’s view.  I’ve never taken the Bible literally, and there’s a whole host of reasons why, but I won’t go into them.  I will however, make what should be an obvious observation which to me is a no-brainer, as to why the book of Revelation couldn’t be an actual prediction of the end of the world.  Let me just say that I haven’t read much of it at all – just snippets, because it bores me to tears and sounds ridiculously naive and stupid (why couldn’t Bible writers think of another conjunction other than ‘and’!)…  Anyway, the no-brainer is thus:
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As parents, it’s our job to teach our children how to be good, moral, honest and caring people – a huge responsibility for which our longer life experience hopefully kits us out for the task, but occasionally the tables are turned and despite their tender years, kids end up teaching us something profound instead. That recently happened to me.

I used to be amazed at my friend Bella’s incredible selflessness when it came to dealing with her ex and what she told her children about him. Although she had plenty to gripe about her life with him to me, she never ever said a bad word to her children about him. He stopped seeing them when they were small, but she never told them about any of the bad times she’d endured with him. I asked her why she never told them the truth, and she said that they didn’t need to know any of that – that that bad period had been between her and her ex, and she didn’t want any of that vindictiveness in her children’s lives now. As I said, I was amazed, because I’d been doing exactly the opposite.

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