Recently been told that my last stuff on eco matters had accidentally transposed the same URL for different articles. Unhappily this appears to mean that now the delightful article on Christmas lights and the amount of 'leccy they use has been lost -I cannot find the original reference. Perhaps someone else can but I've been trawling through my records and cannot find the way to bring the right article up from the archives or even using Google.
Shucks. Never fear, if I find it I'll let it be known here!

On another point arising from email conversation today:
http://www.unification911.org/default.htm
tells us " point little realized is that there also definitely exists a similarity of belief common to all religions that is more pronounced today than ever before. Imagine what would happen if the people of the world were to focus on the similarities of belief rather than our differences.
Imagine...
The point is that if we have our attention on similarities, then there is less attention available to focus on differences."

And this sound very well but reacting to a very similar post I found myself responding:
"I'm involved with a good bit of interfaith and religious diversity stuff through inner city ministry and University and college chaplaincy and I don't find
commonalities unabiguously there. superficial similarities but so embedded
in different narratives and mental furniture that they proove to be
mirage-likenesses quite often. Unless you want to explain the similarities
phenomenologically in which case you are imperialistically imposing
interpretive categories from yet another world view.... I just don't think
that we are all the same really. Like Rowan Williams [our archbishop] says;
religions are each asking different questions so they are not really
speaking of the same things on the whole. However that may mean there's some mileage in sharing the questions.

Melting pot philosophy hasn't worked in racial relationships, not sure why
we think it might work in religion... -I'm being provocative ;-) "

I fear that such pushes to unify religions say more about a kind of modernist imperialism [or some other kind of self-priviledged spiritual viewpoint] than doing justice by the concerns of spiritual philosphies and religions in themselves. The British theologian Gavin D'Costa has written very helpfully about this. His book "The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity." is a good place to start -though you could chat a bit and read a review at
http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m2065/1_54/87425989/p1/article.jhtml