Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and international cooperation

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the Malaysia Airlines jet that went missing two weeks ago. I guess we all have. The story has a high human interest factor. Not only what on earth can have happened to the flight (my husband and I have spent a good deal of time working through the possible options -- mechanical fault, explosion, hijack, pilot suicide; and one can imagine the Malaysian authorities doing exactly the same thing), but also the empathy that one feels with those left behind. How terribly difficult it must be to plan, to do anything, when you simply don’t know what has happened to your loved ones. As unpalatable as it may be, knowing with certainty that someone has died enables one to grieve, deal with the situation as best one can and, one hopes, eventually move forwards into the future. Not knowing what has happened, however, must make it impossible to know how to act. One must always be holding on to the hope that those people are still alive and will, perhaps, turn up again one day, however vanishingly small that possibility is in reality.

But the thing that strikes me most strongly in all of this is the amount of multi-national effort that is being put into locating a plane that was carrying 227 people. Not that I would want this to be any different (one imagines oneself in the shoes of the relatives of the missing here), but it is amazing that so many disparate countries (Malaysia, the US, Australia, China, Norway...) are cooperating so willingly on this task. This contrasts sharply with the current situation in the Ukraine, for example, which sits so dangerously on a knife edge and which, if the situation tips over into all-out war, has the potential for death and destruction on a massively greater scale. Yet there seems to be little likelihood of cooperation or reconciliation here, despite the stakes being so much higher.

What is it, then, that promotes international cooperation in the Malaysia Airlines case? Is it the human angle -- the fact that we can all empathise with the personal tragedy of the situation? But why, then, aren't we able to do this so easily in cases of war or famine? Perhaps suffering on a small scale is simply something that we can comprehend better than the ‘impersonality’ of mass suffering or mass loss of life. Or perhaps it’s just that, in the Malaysia Airlines example, those countries that are cooperating are able to put aside their personal agendas and their differences because these things have no bearing on the specific case in hand.

There doesn't seem to be a definitive answer. But the question is a valid one, and the comparison an interesting one to draw.

Religion and biblical fables

Last week, the media reported on some research carried out by the Bible Society, which indicated a number of things:

• almost three out of ten children did not know that the story of the birth of Jesus comes from the Bible;
• a similar number had never heard stories about Adam and Eve or the Crucifixion;
• more than a third did not know that the tales of the Good Samaritan and David and Goliath come from the Bible;
• many of the parents in the study considered the Bible to be a good source of values for their children AND YET almost half of them did not recognise that the story of Noah's Ark comes from the Bible, and many muddled up biblical stories with the plot lines of well know films such as the Harry Potter series.

I was surprised by these findings -- and the fact that parents were confusing biblical stories with film plots struck me as laughable. How was this possible, I asked myself?

In a bid to understand, I asked my children about the stories listed above and where they come from. They knew the answers and, it turns out, they know a lot more detail about these stories that I do. Our family is not religious (I don't remember having told my children biblical stories), but we do have a good level of general knowledge and my children do attend Church of England schools. Maybe that's the answer, then.

Even though I'm not religious, it strikes me as 'a good thing' to know a bit about the Bible, the stories and morals contained within it, and religion in general. Why? Well, first off because religion is an important part of the history and culture of this country, and is worth learning about for that reason alone. Second, because religion has shaped and affected many of the events and thought processes in British culture (the Crusades, divorce, dissolution of the monasteries, ordination of women, to name but a few). And third because whatever one might think of the Bible (or indeed religion in general) it does impart some significant messages. The importance of putting sectarian differences aside in order to help an individual in need (aka the tale of the Good Samaritan), for example.

Granted the plot lines of the Harry Potter films do highlight some thought-provoking issues, but  for some reason I find myself baulking at according them the same level of historical, cultural and moral significance as our religious and biblical fables.