Sometimes, I love The Herald

Not often, mind you.

The Herald newspaper is too Auckland-centric for its claims to being a 'national' newspaper, puffed up with self importance because everyone else in the country really cares about what the latest troubles are north of the Bombay Hills. News happens in other parts of the country, too, children, why don't you try publishing some of it? So I don't usually read The Herald.

As part of a recent job, I had to read through thousands of pages of microfilm to search for specific stories - from The Herald, The Dominion and The Press. Being stuck in a windowless basement every day may have loosened my grip on sanity somewhat, but I still think this article found in The Herald says something interesting.

"Hawk-eye watch kept on cults"

"Auckland's own cult-busters are based in a simple white house on the edge of the city's Bible belt at Mt Roskill...
Cultwatch is a Christian-based organisation that draws its workers from across the ecumenical divides. But the group insists that it is not out to Bible bash...
We are talking about central, basic, fundamental Christian beliefs. They are: the authority of the Bible, deity of Christ, Virgin birth, atonement of sin at the cross, bodily resurrection of Christ, and the belief in the Second Coming."

Did you see what they did there? Possibly not. Let's take another look.

"in a simple white house on the edge of the city's Bible belt at Mt Roskill..."

Get it now? The authors italicized the title of the Bible. Just as you would when writing a story that referred to Pride and Prejudice. While it may seem like a small act to many, it can also be seen as a slap in the face to all those fundamentalist Christians whose faith demands that they blatantly deny any authorship of the Bible. In the words of the estimable Ben Agger (someone should really make a wikipedia entry about this guy) in his book Socio(onto)logy puts it:

"In mirroring the world, we forget what is text and what is history."

In the chapter that this quote is taken from, he is referring to the way in which the format of academic journals increasingly forces the social sciences into using 'scientific' formats for their articles, meaning that the aspects of social life that sociologists discuss in their articles become scientific 'fact', and thus unable to be argued with. In this way, academic writing, by claiming to be a mirror and reflecting the 'factual' world, creates that world by presenting those facts as unarguable and true.

The same goes when talking about the Bible, something I am sure that Agger has also linked to this discussion, although for the life of me I can't find any reference in the material I have on hand. By treating the Bible as something that does not need to be referenced in the same way as other texts when writing, it denies that it is an authored document, thus denying all the subjectivities and temporality of the text.

Agger once noted that the editors of his work had trouble when he attempted to attribute the author of the bible as Jesus. But denying that it is a humanly authored text only promotes the sort of injustices that we have seen when people use scientific 'fact' as a reason for a damaging course of action, ignoring all the human subjectivities and preferences that went into creating that 'fact'. By citing the Bible as any other text, we renew the divide between text and history.

And for that I say, GO THE HERALD.