Parenting religion: who guards the guardians?

"'I now disrespect parents who are religious,' says Aisha, 'because I think they just twist religion to suit their own ends or to please their social circle. I have gone from being a hijabi to doubting my faith altogether. I feel that in order for there to be any change, parents need to learn how to practise Islam in a positive way, rather than using it as a weapon to condemn others. Also, we need to stop backbiting because it is the source of intense family anxiety. Girls will never be able to live out their dreams.'"
It is, of course, not just Muslims who can suffer these difficulties. Though I must say that the picture of 'Muslim' family life presented through the eyes of the women in this article is very disturbing, though we should recall that two hundred years ago in GB the parenting might have seemed remarkably similar. Of course, once you get into the article you relise that the real issue is family honour which seems to be more important than religion, though religion clearly plays a legitimating function in the culture concerned. What I can't get a clear answer on is how far that legitimation in Islam is central or peripheral; is family honour 'de fide' or a cultural accretion? Clearly the women pay the price for it, while, by observation, the men largely get away with murder [sometimes almost literally].

Certainly reading it I feel that the better way of bringing up children is to provide security and love and build an atmosphere of respect and trust. The idea of setting curfews for coming home from school and breeding fear of socialisation seems horrific to me: it says, implicitly, to the kids, "you are not trustworthy and you are bound to want to do wrong" and I can't help feeling that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in many cases. It is another case of obliquity: if you aim to prevent your kids straying you create conditions conducive to the things you fear. To make it more likely that your children will grow up well 'simply' love and respect them. I don't disagree with boundaries, the issue isn't boundaries, the issue is how you make and enforce them. It can be done oppresively and without real thought about how the child might respond ['love your neighbour as yourself' applies to your kids too] then the seeds of conflict are sown.
EducationGuardian.co.uk | higher news | Time out for bad behaviour:

You are what you invest in

"'The entire secular growth in the Republican vote can be explained by the growth of stock ownership. It changes what you read, what you watch, and what you think.'"
Or to put it biblically: "Where your treasure thereyour heart will be also".
Extending home ownership was a key piece of policy for the Thatcher government as was increasing share owning. The above quote is from an article about doing something similar in the USA. Why am I commenting? Because it seems to me that it is particularly interesting and significant: the attempt to tie more people more securely into the system of global money so that they are more likely to support the values and continued existence of that system. It is a way of cementing global injustice through the stakeholding of the global richest. Of course it makes them more vulnerable if the system [which Bishop David Jenkins not inaccurately refered to as a global pyramid scheme] becomes 'unstable' which is quite likely given that it is largely built on and cemented together by oil and oil is about to become and increasingly sacre commodity. It really is quite disturbing, in fact, because the repercussions globally are so big.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Pensions and penury: the Galveston experiment prepares to go national:

Hubbert's Peak Is Here

If this is right we need to urgently think about our lifestyle choices because energy is inevitably going to get expensive. Don't forget the knock on effects of that. Since much of our food is grown with petrochemical fertilisers and pesticides and transported using oil and wrapped in oil [that's what plastic is, folks, in the final analysis] and ditto for most of what we buy, then this is quite possibly the beginning of the end of cheap food and consumer goods. Back to the world I grew up in during the sixties and seventies; local seasonal food and less stuff to buy. Maybe. The urgent need for us as Christians is to think about our lifestyle-discipleship. I recommend Tom Sine's books for further thinking.Joel Makower: Two Steps Forward: Hubbert's Peak Is Here

Ecopod: Environmentally friendly Coffins

As a priest, as an envirnomentalist and as someone who will die and whose parents are looking at woodland burial, this can only be interesting: I love these designs.Ecopod: Environmentally friendly Coffins :: Home

Postcards from the Global food system

A useful first in a series of articles on the global food chain. This gets my attention because as a long-time fair-trader and former wholefoods shop worker I think that being part of answering the prayer for daily bread is a noble calling but at the same time that is not to endorse all that goes on in the name of food produciton and distibution. THis looks to be a promising series of articles which judging by the first in the series will be insightful and helpful in educating us.
Part of my reason for hoping for good things from this series is the author's starting point and learning curve: "In trying to grasp the food system, my initial, rather simple-minded, mistake was to assume that just because a single system existed there must also be a single, universal logic to go with it, and all I had to do in order to understand food was to grasp that logic. Through a grindingly painful process I came realized that there actually isn’t a single over-riding logic but rather there are multiple, conflicting and sometimes faulty logics which together produce the incredibly complex global food system. (Like most a-ha’s I wondered why someone hadn’t simply told me this at the start.) What’s more, many of these logics are profoundly disconnected from each other. So for example, the logic that gives rise to the decisions of an urban consumer is a universe away from the logic of a small farmer living twenty miles away."

Postcards From The Global Food System

A useful first in a series of articles on the global food chain. This gets my attention because as a long-time fair-trader and former wholefoods shop worker I think that being part of answering the prayer for daily bread is a noble calling but at the same time that is not to endorse all that goes on in the name of food produciton and distibution. THis looks to be a promising series of articles which judging by the first in the series will be insightful and helpful in educating us.

Part of my reason for hoping for good things from this series is the author's starting point and learning curve: "In trying to grasp the food system, my initial, rather simple-minded, mistake was to assume that just because a single system existed there must also be a single, universal logic to go with it, and all I had to do in order to understand food was to grasp that logic. Through a grindingly painful process I came realized that there actually isn’t a single over-riding logic but rather there are multiple, conflicting and sometimes faulty logics which together produce the incredibly complex global food system. (Like most a-ha’s I wondered why someone hadn’t simply told me this at the start.) What’s more, many of these logics are profoundly disconnected from each other. So for example, the logic that gives rise to the decisions of an urban consumer is a universe away from the logic of a small farmer living twenty miles away."

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Postcards From The Global Food System

Gravity powered aircraft flies with no fuel

Amazing but apparently true. I must admit I'd been wondering whether there was any mileage in lightening aircraft with helium but I had got the background to realise that it could be so revolutionary. REad th earticle and see.

gizmag Article: Gravity powered aircraft flies with no fuel

UK pioneers digital film network

I think it must've been about five years ago when I first read that this was possible: "The world's first digital cinema network will be established in the UK over the next 18 months". Of course it could be a big step forward for distribution -no more physical moving of reels. In theory that could mean openings here at the same time as in the USA which would be a boon. though I rather suspect some anti-competitive forces at work in the present arrangement.

The nice thing is that the cheapness of the technology could mean less mass films could be more available which I think culturally would be a good thing.
BBC NEWS | Technology | UK pioneers digital film network:

Matthew 5:23-26

So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

This passage clearly presupposes a temple still being used by Jesus' followers. Does this help us with the sticky problem of the commands not being anulled but fulfilled? Does it mean that we can sigh with releif and say that only goes for Jewish followers during the temple period? Woulld be nice and it would work if the earlier passage didn't say 'Until heaven and earth pass away'. So no help here on that question.

Anyway, more to the point: this is, in terms more transferable to our life-circumstances, an example of the kind of thing that is involved in doing God's will more righteously than the scribes and pharisees. Not only do we need to learn to deal with 'murderous' anger and contempt, we ned to be prepared to be proactive in putting things right -and we can't let so-called religious duties be used as excuses to put off doing that. It seems to me that in putting altar-work at the heart of this example, Jesus is saying that the formalities of religious practice take second place to the importance of reconciliation and love. Actually this is no surprise but it is interesting to note how easy it is for us to imagine that formal religiosity takes precedence; as if God is more interested in our church attendance than in our being right with others in as far as it lies with us [see Paul's appropriation of this in Romoans 12].

I think that the 'coming to terms' thing is saying that we should deal with things quickly before they become hardened into situations where there is no going back. We all know that there are situations where. if things go to the next level there is no going back and reconciliation is going to be a whole lot harder.

In personal terms: if I manage to effect reconciliation with you before you start telling friends about what has happened and so developing a public narrative of opposition, hurt, betrayal and righteous anger which makes it harder for you to step back from your 'official' version of events [because it involves eating some of your own words] or me to discover how to mend fences without having to eat humble pie more publically, then it is going to be a lot easier. If it goes public and we satart playing to our own galleries, then it gets so much harder to reconcile because we also start to get entangled in maintaining our own public image and bound up with our own supporters and the whole thing has begun to take on a life of its own.

To given an example of the kind of thing in church history: the Roman Catholic church has, over a lot of things, largely recognised that the protestant reformers had a lot of right on their side. Not in so many words but in practice. Many inheritors of the Reformation have recognised that there are things that used routinely to be condemned as papist superstition that have some sense to them and biblical roots. It's a shame on both sides, then, that the differences had been hardened into institutional terms of mutual opprobrium so that now pulling the body of Christ back together is so much harder. I know that there will be people on both sides who will shoot me down for that but I hope it will at least illustrate what I mean.

More controversially still we can see the danger in Anglican terms now: if the divisions over gay practice in Christian discipleship are hardened institutionally then we will have two bodies somewhat at enmity whereas if we can find ways not to institutionalise the division it may be that in 50 years, when it won't [?] be an issue, we may still be on the same side and not looking at a way to heal yet a further division made harder by fifty years of doing things differently.

It seems to me that Jesus is commending a way of doing things that involves making peacemaking a priority even over formal religious acts -in fact peacemaking as worship?- and of dealing with things in such a way as to make future reconciliation more and not less likely. He is telling us that if we have wronged others it is up to us to do what we can to put things right.

I wonder how much our churches teach to this end and act accordingly; I think that it an area of huge weakness in much contemporary Christian discipleship.

Told you so

I keep saying that under our present economic and social conditions, GB can't survive nationally without immigration here's another reason why: "People's attitudes to foreign labour change dramatically when they find an affordable Polish plumber".
Now there are downsides [read the article] but in the bigger picture ...?
Guardian Unlimited | Economic dispatch | Immigrants are driving the growth engine:

Yoga and western psycho-culture

A number of years ago I used to do a bit of Yoga -in my 'New Age period'. I'm interested to note that it seems still to be going strong and continuing to mutate in western culture. It's interesting to note a niche in western culture that it seems to be adapting to and there is a downside: "'Paradoxically, the characteristics that create a great yoga practice - extreme sensitivity, perfectionism and wanting to be in control - are also characteristics of anorexia,' says Clare, a London-based yoga teacher. 'Being sensitive, you feel the nature of the postures more, so get more out of them; perfectionism makes you want to keep doing it better; and I remember a friend once saying to me that all yoga teachers are control freaks.'"

Of course, this is just why having religious traditions that have a bit of a track record and a history of making their insights work for real people living normal lives, can be important: compassion and wel-roundedness can start to be part of the picture if they weren't before. Not that I am saying that Yoga as often practiced in the west is religion, just acknowledging that it has had a respected place within religious practice which is not necessarily the same thing: the tools a religion uses may be applicable more widely where they are actually touching on things to do with our common humanity: neural structures, brain-body interface, etc.

There are a few questions that arise from this report though. One is the need to monitor and act on the results of seeing how different personalities interact with disciplines, rituals, aids and insights. What is helpful for one may be baneful for another. I certaily wonder whether some of those who have achieved status as canonised saints were in fact being 'rewarded' for following unhealthy impulses which just happened to impress people who had a different personality structure and differing weaknesses. Some Catholic and medieval practice seesm to be a particularly good area to study in this repsect. I'm thinking of asceticism and mortification of the flesh understood in a dualist thought-world where matter tended to be denigrated and desire too easily and fully equated with concupiscence and therefore sin. SO we can't afford to be too smug. Motes and beams, folks, motes and beams.

We see something of this cultural contamination in the yoga report:
Several teachers point to the fact that yoga seems to be understood in a certain way by westerners. "It's give me, give me now, I want it now, I want enlightenment now, I want to relax now, I want a body beautiful in a few weeks," says Radha at Yoga Plus in Crete. McCreddie adds, "It's really sad that the western world has taken something and just bastardised and contorted it to the point at which we no longer know what it should have been."
That's part of my evidence to say that we shouldn't necessarily understand western yoga religiously in the strict sense. Mostly it seems to be a set of practices, a cultural artefact, that has been taken fronm the context it was found in and reintegrated into a western philosophical mindset crucially determined by consumerist values and issues of self- and body image. This is a typical move in that rag-bag of ideas and practices we tend to label 'New Age' where the common factor is precisely the concern for self and self-identity informed by consumerism and so a Borg-like assimilation of the distinctiveness of other religious, spiritual and cultural items and ideas. It looks like diversity and pluralism; in fact it is assimilation. It actually goes beyond newagery; our whole culture tends to be implicated. Newagery is just the spiritual/religious face of it.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Omming on empty:

Report doubts future of wind power

THis is interesting: "The report, which may have ramifications for the UK's rapidly growing wind farm industry, concludes that instead of spending billions on building new wind turbines, the emphasis should be on making houses more energy efficient"

Of course it's the financial intruments and models thta are determinative here: it's easier to get businesses to set up wind turbines than to help power companies to see a profit in domestic energy efficiency. And finding ways to get domestic users to stump up the capital costs of more efficient energy-saving stuff and retro-fitting houses is even harder -especially in the heated UK housing market where costs are already high as a result of us living on a rather crowded island. Unless a way is found to square that circle we have a financial model which will favour incresing power production as opposed to power saving.

SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Society Environment | Report doubts future of wind power:

Using air to charge cellphones

Mini wind turbines for charging phones: neat.Using air to charge cellphones? IIT-Delhi does it!

Europe Hydrogen Car Filling Network Feasible

Interesting that the infrastructure costs may be less than anticiapted....Planet Ark : Europe Hydrogen Car Filling Network Feasible-Study

Hydroelectric power's dirty secret revealed

A timely article from New Scientist in view of the last blog entry here on hydroing the Congo.

It means that my 'cleanish' verdict on hydro is severly questioned by the discovery that hydro can often produce quite a bit of methane which is considerably more potent as a warming gas than CO2 [x21]. This is "because large amounts of carbon tied up in trees and other plants are released when the reservoir is initially flooded and the plants rot. Then after this first pulse of decay, plant matter settling on the reservoir's bottom decomposes without oxygen, resulting in a build-up of dissolved methane. This is released into the atmosphere when water passes through the dam's turbines."
I guess it wouldn't be a problem if the biomass merely turned to CO2 because it is not fossil CO2, the problem is that it ends up as methane.
No one mentioned that in the Guardian article. Perhaps the fact that the Congo scheme isn't about damming mitigates the impact since it is a scheme to divert some of the flow down generation channels and then the outfolw is fed back into the river. Presumably that would mean considerably less die-back of vegetation under water.
New Scientist Breaking News - Hydroelectric power's dirty secret revealed

Hydro-electricity to all of Africa?

Just before Christmas, in a quiz, I wrongly guessed that the biggest single source of electricity generation in the world was nuclear power. In fact it is hydro. With that in mind you might want to read about this potential project to use the Congo which could generate enough for all of Africa -but at what cost and how would it be transmitted, and lets not forget the issues about security of supply and the advantages of decentralisation. On the plus side it is at least a clean-ish source of power in greenouse gas terms [not totally because concrete, infrastructure, building etc will almost certainly use fossil fuels].

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Could a $50bn plan to tame this mighty river bring electricity to all of Africa?

Matthew 5:21-22

"You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire."

Righteousness greater than that of the scribes and Pharisees may just be illustrated by these verses and those that follow where Jesus seems to be picking up bits of their teaching ['you have heard it said'] and then exceeding the demands; deepening the teaching, if you will, or perhaps 'raising the bar' if you prefer athletic/height metaphors.

To me the interesting thing is the way that Jesus seems to be switching the focus of the matter from external conformity to rules to internal attitudes [which, of course, drive actions ultimately if left unchecked]. So the issue underlying murder is identified as anger with the person or contempt of them. I think that we should be careful to note that anger per se is not necessarily the issue. We do see Jesus getting angry at times but it does seem that his anger was mostly about wrong situations. I may be wrong but I'm not sure that we see him angry with people except, possibly where they have identified themselves with the object or situation of wrongness. I will need to look into that more fully. Anyway the point I want to make is that there may be times when it is right ot be angry and to use the energy of anger to put things right. However, being hatefully angry with other people is risking judgement and contempt of others likewise. These are the impulses that grow into murder. They are about, in our hearts and minds, wishing the other person erased and erasing from our consciousness the awareness that here is someone who could be redeemed, who carries the image of God and for whom God still has purposes to be fulfilled, who is capable of bringing something of God's kingdom into the life of the world. It is an assetion of our own perspective above the bigger picture and a refusal on our part to be corrected by those wider considerations.

What do we do, though, if we find we have fallen into person-centred anger or contempt? First of all we need to identify it; not always easy and so having a community of honest and loving people around us is a big help here.

Secondly we need to recognise it's wrong. Again, this isn't always easy because we have a tendency [don't we?] to rationalise and find justifications for where we find ourselves in life. Commonly these can consist of finding reasons that seem to make our anger or contempt acceptable: 'She shouldn't be allowed to get away with that', 'He deserves it; he forfeits his humanity when he acts like that.' Sometimes we argue within oursleves that we are entitled to be angry, other times we argue that the other deserves to be hurt or punished or eradicated because they have become odious and contemptible. Either way we are dodging the truth that this person is still loved and potentially called by God. Sometimes we are reacting out of hurt: we have been hurt by them or by someone that they represent [or that we identify them with] and so we want to hurt back. In this case we have dehumanised them into a punchbag or a symbol for our retaliation. Very often we have added onto them all sorts of things that don't really belong to them [malice, commonly -mostly people aren't malicious; simply greedy, self-centred or unthinking -just like us]
So we usually need to remind oursleves that they are loved by God and made in God's image. We need to remember that actually for the most part they are pretty like us, that we ourselves might hurt and upset others or act wrongly for largely similar reasons. In other words we need to start seeig them again as fellow human beings rather than punchbags, demons incarnate or monsters. It often helps to distinguish the sin and the sinner. In actual fact it is the wrong thing done [or right thing not done] that has hurt us or someone we love or some principle we hold dear. It may be that the person might repent if they are given space and a supportive context. It may be that the wrongdoer feels bad about how things turned out but your misdirected anger will evoke in them defensiveness, self-justification or rationalisation.

If our attitudes are person-centred anger and contempt then we are simply participating in and furthering the cycle of sin and death. We have stepped out of the cycle of redemption and life; we are contributing to the campaign of the enemy of souls.

So in the background of all this we need to be developing the skills of self-awareness, and self-examination, a healthy dose of skepticism about our justifications and rationalisations, the habit of seeing in others that we don't 'like' the characteristics of humanity and the image of God and even trying to attend to the possible movements of the Holy Spirit in their souls. We need to learn to be slow to identify people closely with their effects on our life. We need to be able to recall that how we have understood something may not be how it was intended.

We need also to recall that we are responsible for our reactions: no-one makes me angry; I interpret something as being wrong and at some level decide to react with anger. I can change my perception or at least question it. If wrong has been done and anger is in some way appropriate, I can decide that my anger is better directed at the situation than the persons in it and I can learn how to use it to make things better. Making things better doesn't happen by dumping all the blame on one person or group of people and hurting or destroying them. We only set ourselves up to become what we hate and often to stir up in others what we have become and so become the objects of their anger and contempt. Sin and death spiral out of control, unless someone dares to stop it.

Blessed are the peacemakers...

Crosswalk.com - Matthew 5:21-22:

Crosswalk.com - Matthew 5:19 - 20

"Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven"
Which commandemnts? Most probable is the ones just talked about: the Law of Moses etc. Another possibility is the ones Jesus is about to give in the rest of the teaching but I reckon the first is the better sense. It tightens the screw of the difficulty we looked at yesterdy still further. It seems to be saying that Jesus' followers should be observing the 613 laws of Torah; or at least it applies to Jewish followers of Christ. There is evidence even within the NT that many Jewish followers of Chirst were zealous for the Law of Moses. However, Paul seems to have theologically disagreed with that and to have been prepared not to observe the 613 Laws in order to win gentiles. So is Paul least in the Kingdom of God? Are we? And remember, unless you as a Christian are having a basically kosher diet, resting on Saturday and so on you are not keeping the commandments. Certainly some muslims would look at what I've just written and see it as evidence that Christians have distorted the word of God that the prophet Isa [Jesus] came to bring.

Perhaps part of the resolving of this issue comes in the words about righteousness exceeding that of the scribes and Pharisees. If anyone kept the Law it was them; they were most careful about it and they are the benchmark of Law-keeping. And yet clearly they didn't measure up; so what chance have we got? How can our righteousness exceed theirs? Even Paul said that his time as a Law-observer was faultless, and yet he didn't make it into the Kingdom of God on that basis.

And we should note that if we don't exceed pharisaic righteousness we are even worse off than the least in the Kingdom -we may not even enter it. Better to be the tax-collector who says "Be merciful to me God, a sinner" and be the least in the Kingdom, than as righteous as the pharisee who sees the other's faults and yet doesn't go away from his prayer time right with God. We can, surely, only exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees by having Christ's; by seeking not our own righteousness but God's mercy. Christ fulfills the Law, all of it. In him the Law is accomplished and reaches its purpose. His fulfililng of it is shared with those of us who are in him. That's what Paul realised as he reflected on the experience of not finding peace with God through the Law and reflecting on the meaning of Christ as the Holy Spirit led him and the Christian community into an ever fuller understanding of the implications of who Christ was and what he did. What we could not do Christ does and shares with us as we become alive to God in him our task then is not to seek to get right with God by being good but to get good by being right with God and consistently living in Christ in every dimension and aspect of our lives. To become who we are in Christ.
Crosswalk.com - Matthew 5:19 - 20:

Matthew 5:17-18

"'Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.

For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished"

I think that we should acknowledge that the interpretation of this verse is already structurally embedded into Christian church life and practice in many, many ways. Our practice tells us that we do not interpret it to mean that the law of Moses is still incumbant upon us: we do not observe the Sabbath [the seventh day, ie Saturday -as witnessed by the name for Saturday in various European languages -Syboty, Sabado etc] as a rest day. We do allow the charging of interest on loans [though only since the late middle ages], we allow people to eat Pork, black pudding, shellfish and so on. We do not circumcise our male children on their eighth day. We allow mixed fibres in clothing; and that's before we get onto the really controversial stuff. I do realise that some groups do observe Sabbath and Kosher food, but they are not mainstream and -well, I don't agree with 'em so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that set of views. The Sabbath law is interesting because a lot of people like to distinguish between the moral and the ceremonial law as a way to slip out of the challenges of interpreting these verses. However, I don't think that they realise that the ten commandments may have an item of ceremonial law in them. Either that or they have allowed us to reinterpret the moral law quite radically at that point -heck, we've changed the day!



So, most of us come to this with a vested interest in not having to observe the law of Moses, all 613 commandments of it. And yet Jesus says the law will not pass away 'until heaven and earth pass away' and the 'all is accomplished most naturally seems to refer to the end of the ages in this context. Jesus appears to be saying it still stands. But perhpas we need also to bear in mind how he himself dealt with the law. The keeping of Sabbath is a notable test case for the gospel writers and for us as readers. Jesus declared himself the Lord of the Sabbath [an implicit claim to deity I think since God is rightfully the lord of the sabbath by reason of his having created it -however you interpret that]. I think that adds up to claiming to fulfill the sabbath especially as the sabbath is made for man not the other way round and Jesus is The Man. All is accomplished in Christ and what is accomplished will last to the End. The prophets words still guide our thinking and our intepreting the meaning of Christ and the people of God, to guide and encourage us, to rebuke us and to call us. So does the law; just not in the same way as for the Pharisees, for example.



Not one little bit of the Law will pass away. However that isn't necessarily the same as saying 'it will all be binding on my followers ...'; it could simply be a recognition that it will continue in use, to be read and learnt from; to be scripture. Until earth and heaven pass away Jesus will continue telling us that it will all be fulfilled -in Himself. In Christ the Law is kept and fulfilled. In Christ it becomes our heritage but not our bondage. He carries the yoke of the law so that we may know rest ['sabbath' -see Matt.11.28-30] and enter into the end-of-time Rest even in the here-and-now. It doesn't excuse us from ethical behaviour for in Christ we are given an identity that includes living Christfully [see Romans 5-8] and a calling to live up to who we are.



Well, that's where I'm up to with it.

Crosswalk.com - MAtthew 5:17-18:

What they need for the Houses of Parliament.

Lots of warm air escaping the houses of parliament. BUt they're old building, so what can you do? I suspect that the technologies mentioned in this artcle for windows and interior paint could help quite a bit ... write to your MP?

Alive! Lost things resurface

A good illustration of what links reportage makes or doesn't make. This story is about the things that were found after many years from the famous crash in the Andes which resulted in the survivors saying alive by eating their dead fellow passengers. The report here makes links to the Hollywood usage of the story. They could have, of course, made a link to the shrinking glaciers resulting from global warming. Given a choice between movie stars and the end of civilisation as we know it the film stars have it every time.

Of course I know there are other reasons for reporting it that way: human interest is the chiefest as well as making links with the readers' experience and current knowledge. But surely not beyond the wit of a good writer to dig out the human interest on an ecological story?

I'm lovin' it!

Call me cynical but I just don't see it happening. I tend to think that the Asda effect is more likely: the enormous buying power becomes oppressive to producers. "advocacy groups said that they were hopeful that McDonald's would one day use its power not only to get better prices and greater supply, but also to change the way the produce industry operates - for the better"

This is on th eback of Maccy D's starting more healthy lines of meals. That's not to say it wouldn't be nice to have a big chain convert to ever more ecologically sound operations.

I'm lovin' it! | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist Magazine:

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Christians for a Greener World

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Christians for a Greener World

Nice resource article puling together links for Christian organisations concerned with the environment.

Scientists Looking at Ways to Trap Greenhouse Gases

I wonder whether these are the same companies that pay for research to show that global warming either isn't proven or isn't anthropogenic? "Twenty-five U.S. energy companies have committed $3 million to establish six biological carbon sequestration projects in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi through a group called PowerTree Carbon Co. The consortium aims to plant enough trees to capture more than 2 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere"

Anyway, such research seems to indicate that they do think that there's a problem ... I can't help feeling though that the more sensible way to run a power business is not to define yourself as a caol-fired power station company and so to find ways to carry on burning fossil fuel, surely it is better to define yourself a being in the power business and finding alternatives or even being in the busniness of keeping people warm or cool and well-lit and perhaps seeling services that save external power and maintain in-house generation or savings.

Scientists Looking at Ways to Trap Greenhouse Gases (washingtonpost.com):

build your own eco house

I found this inspiring not least because it says something about the planning laws and possibilities in the UK. Now all I want is someone who's done a hobbit hole in the midlands and I have the full set.Brook Farm, Butleigh, Glastonbury, UK

Edinburgh says no to road toll

Asking people about such things is a bit like asking turkeys to vote for Christimas; the forces of inertia and distrust are too great to do what may be the right thing. Sometimes we need to recall that elected representatives really are not delegates: they aren't there to vote according to the wishes of their electorate but to learn what the issues are and to try to do the best thing. Individual voters tend to have a n individual perspective and don't agglomerate their actions and desires into thousands or millions of people all doing the same thing; thus the freedom to drive where they want, when they want is desired and voted for; however, the sheer volume of pople all wanting to do the same thing in practice both curtails that freedom and inhibits the development of [in this case] better alternatives to allow most people greater mobility and a better environment. Sometimes the unpopular thing has to be done for th common good. Of course, as I write this I realise that this is also the kind of thing that is said to justify dictatorial actions and tyranny; "it's for the good of the people, they'll thanks us later". What we need to to make sure that we find ways to aggregate people's individual responses in such a way as to feedback to the point of decision the effects. In that way people can be smart corporately. Congestion charging is one such mechanism [crude though it may be, but effective it is]. Edinburgh is not easy to drive round -even on a Sunday- either the price of something like a congestion charge is paid or the price will be paid by residents in slower journey times, increased health costs, more accidents, more petrol used [as they wander around trying to find parking spaces] and even less investment in public transport fuelling the cycle to suburbanisation which increases the car-ification of society further thus increasing congestion, decreasing freedom of movement and with costs to social cohesion and health. Oh and that's not factoring in the economic shock of irrevocably rising oil prices that will hit within the next decade. Now is the time to be building infrastructure and systems to help. Edinburgh; you blew it.
I think that the longer-term perspective is shown in this quote from the article about the London Congestion charge: "'Before the London scheme was introduced, 43% of Londoners were opposed and 38% supported,' said Jos Dings, director of the European Federation for Transport. 'But several months after the launch, those for the charge outnumbered those against by more than two to one.'"
SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Society | Edinburgh says no to road toll:

Andii 

Brown & Blair: The waiting game

I think that if Gordon Brwon is really interested in being PM once Anthony Blair esq folds his hand then it makes it unlikely that this represents reality. "these high-profile visits have occurred in quick succession has provoked speculation that Mr Brown is interested in becoming foreign secretary after the next election." Unless of course he has reasons for thinking that it is unlikely he would get to be party leader /PM or he has other reasons for not going for it. I think that Brown is Labour's best asset, and the opinion polls seem to agree, but he is an asset as chancellor. I'm not sure, myself, that it would transfer if he were prospective PM. I don't think he has what it takes to be PM in terms of voter appeal. The man who does seem to me to have that certain je ne sais quoi in the Labour team is a fellow-scot: John Reid -him I can see as a PM. He has the right kind of voter appeal; look and sound and charisma. Gordon Brown is a bit scary.
Guardian Unlimited | Economic dispatch | The waiting game:

Matthew 5:16

"In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven"

The others are presumably those who are not disciples. What interests me is that here we don't have, a many church leaders nowadays would like it to say, '.. so that they may see your good works and become Christians'. No; it's giving glory to the Father that is important [shades of the first line of the Lord's Prayer. I'm intrigued at how making disciples doesn't really make it on to the agenda of Jesus' teaching until the end of Matthew. Now you could argue that giving glory to God implies a right relation to God and that sort of implies becoming Christians, or whatever. I'm not so convinced, though, that that is not eisegetical: reading far too much into the text. The way the world, time and time again, comes over to me through Jesus' teaching is that there are a group of called people who are disciples, some of whom are apostles, and there are a load of people who respond positiviley to Christ and the disciples who nevertheless don't become disciples but seem to be rightly related to God and might be called 'saved' [all those people that Jesus says things like 'your faith has made you well/saved' to]. Maybe it's because they are Jews and are presumed, at least at this point, to be part of God's covenant of salvation ... ?



For me the intriguing possibility it opens up is that we too should expect that there may be people of good will who are not part of the church in formal terms, who nevertheless are within the household of salvation because they are responding within their own lives to that which is of God, to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. These are the ones who will recognise God's work as good and give glory to God when they see the evidence of the Spirit at work in people's lives.



I don't know: I'm still thinking about that and I am trying to negotiate a path between the kind of fideism that sees only a very few saved [even only 144,000!] and a universalism that sees all being saved [which seems to contradict the way that warnings of hell are given]. I'm also trying to preserve the insight that salvation is of God, not our own efforts, and God takes the initiative by the Holy Spirit in individual lives, we can only respond and 'faith' is the only response that makes sense of the overture. So I find myself drawn towards a kind of Rahnerian anonymous Christian position. I guess I'm also aware that Jesus' seems to make a strong critique of religion as a mechanism for welf-justification that nullifies or excludes a faith response to God. A critique that even applies to Christian religious forms; a critique that warns us of our propensity to seek 'salvation' in things that seem more securely rooted in the more tangible realities of this world that we can control.



In other words I'm seeking a way of thinking about such things that keeps faith with the Christian heritage of salvation /exclusion yet does justice by the generosity of love and the sometimes /often rather profligate way that Jesus seems to deal with people. In his teaching its the religious people, along with the rich who seem to be in the greatest peril of losing their souls and it is people who simply accept God's overtures with gladness who seem to be, tacitly, assumed to be okay, to be people of goodwill [?]



As I say, still thinking about this but not fully satisfied with a lot of the answers given traditionally; from limited atonement to universalism.

Crosswalk.com - Matthew 5:16:

'IRA - it is time for you to go'

The other day I mentioned how with this bank job being pinned on the IRA, it increasingly makes it look like Sinn Fein are the political arm of a mobster organisation. Well it appears I'm not the only one who thinks so. I'm in good company with the Irish Republic's former PM and others describing 'criminality' as a stumbling block to the peace process and calling for the IRA to disband. Shockinly, too, Irish police beleive that Martin McGinnis and Gerry Adams are part of the IRA council.Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | 'IRA - it is time for you to go'

Unequivocal: GW is anthropogenic

Important to check this out: "The study destroys a central argument of global warming sceptics within the Bush administration - that climate change could be a natural phenomenon."

News:

older students?

When I started as a university chaplain one of the things I used to say as part of educating my fellow church people about university was that 'increasingly students are maturer'. Then along came student loans and tuition fees and all of a sudden that trend stopped. You can't get a student loan if you're older and they don't give 'em for postgraduate degrees either [I know, I've been looking into all of this malarkey/malachi]. So the possibiity that the government might decide to look again at this is intiguing. As the Guardian puts it: "For the young, who currently own the campus, any competition from their elders and betters is a dismaying prospect. They are right to be apprehensive. The influx of oldies would gobble up scarce funds. To whom would the prudent bank manager lend? The long-term customer with a perfect credit rating and a paid-up mortgage? Or the hungover, mumbling adolescent with two maxed-out credit cards? Oldies would dominate the classroom. Who would the history teacher rather have in a seminar? A student who has been reading the Guardian for 30 years? Or a student who has just cancelled their subscription to the Beano, is moving on to NME, and has a photo of Charlie, formerly of Busted, over their bed? Lower testoterone and no PMT (let alone STD, LSD or MDMA) means less distraction: more and better BAs, MAs and PhDs."
Personally I think that a better mix of ages on campus would be a good thing: it may even help us to address those worrying issues like binge drinking and STD's ... I say 'help' not 'solve' and I recognise that it may not b=work out that way, either.
EducationGuardian.co.uk | comment | Golden years:

Royal wedding may not be legal!

I'm no royalist-loyalist and so I find the irony implicit in this rather delicious: "Dr Cretney and other experts raised the question of whether the marriage was actually legal under existing law. Dr Cretney argues that members of the royal family have no power under marriage law to contract civil marriages."
Ouch! the downsides of monarchy ...
Though in fairness it does look like it is, as they say, a moot point -read the article to find out why.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Royal wedding open to all, says law

Smart Grid power

Useful reference article about how power distribution needs to change. Including the good work already underway in the UK and Europe to incorporate projected larger amounts of renewable and smaller scale power production into the grid. Did you know we were doing that? Me neither, but I'm glad to know.WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Smart Grids, Grid Computing, and the New World of Energy

How Green Was My Atom

Hear hear: " nuclear power is -- well, not quite “too cheap to meter,” a hollow promise the industry made back in the 1950s, but mere pennies a kilowatt-hour, they swear. That’s true . . . if you don’t count the high security costs of protecting nuclear plants, the environmental damage of uranium mining, and the incalculable costs of safely storing nuclear wastes -- something we haven’t yet figured out how to do. It’s like saying that the real price of gas is whatever we pay at the pump."

Feels good to have someone else saying what I've been saying even in these very blog-columns

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: How Green Was My Atom

How Green Was My Atom

Da Vinci Code debate comes full circle

This looks like a fun thing to watch: "The event in Vinci, just outside Florence, began Friday with an opening statement by Alessandro Vezzosi, director of a Leonardo museum. He said he would produce photographs and documents as evidence of the mistakes and historical inaccuracies in Dan Brown's best seller."
I hope it gets the publicity it deserves and needs.
Da Vinci Code :: Da Vinci Code debate comes full circle:

India: The next knowledge superpower

On reflection, thinking about what I know about university recruitment of international students to British universities, this is no surprise. India are an up and coming knowledge superpower, potentially. What thiese articles by New Scientist bring out is the advances that are being made and the potential there is. As a Christian who is a concerned global citizen, I commend this to you for prayer and reflection. For UK readers it is worth noting that even though Christians are a minority in India, their numbers are greater than the whole population of the UK ...
"The investment bank Goldman Sachs estimates that if India gets everything right it will have the third largest economy in the world by 2050, after China and the US. India is not yet a knowledge superpower. But it stands on the threshold."
Watch and pray ...
New Scientist India special: The next knowledge superpower - Features

Matthew 5:13 - 15

"You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid.

No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house"

I'm presuming that these words are meant to describe those who live by the teaching implied by the beatitudes. Because they are different -being 'lucky' in ways that others might find hard to understand- then they stand out. It may feel like standing out to be picked on but the reality is that it is standing out like a well visible light. In fact the pressure of standing out might be such as to make disciples want to hide themselves -and therefore their light- but the task is to give light not to hide it. This really is in line with the idea that thoese chosen by God are chosen for their benefit and service to the world, not for special blessings of comfort and success. St Theresa of Avila, after a particularly trying day is reputed to have said to God 'If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.'



It's interesting to note how much more comfortable churches are with thei imagery of light than with the salt image. Perhaps because salt has lost its immediacy as an image with modern technology and availability? However, the downside is that light implies a greater separation from what it lights. Salt has to be right up against and rubbed into what it preserves and disinfects and flavours. Light can serve at a distance -in fact is often better for doing so. I wonder whether our preferred metaphor is implicitly justifying an ungodly separation from the world, or even partly causing it? When we think of ourselves as light it is easy to have images that place us as the light source [or refraction point] over here and those we light over there. If we have contact with them it is because they see the light and, moth-like, fly over to join us. Implicitly a 'come to us' mission is priviledged as against a 'go and be with' missiology.



So I plead for us to take take a break from using the light metaphor in favour of the salt metaphor for a hundred years or so.

Crosswalk.com - Matthew 5:13 - 15:

Hockey stick for beginners

Just worth knowing where you can get hold of this for future reference...

Gmail invites

Wo! Just noticed that I have 50 -that's fifty- gmail invitations. Want one? email me andiibowsher [at] gmail dot com...
Gmail - Inbox

Markets, etc.

You may or may not have noticed that a couple of weeks back I dropped 'The Commons Blog' from my blog roll. While I agreed with their basic stance that if externalities were included then the market would produce solutions to the environmental issues we have, I started to find that the global warming denialism and rose-tinted view of current environmental realities got too much to stomach: esentially I had an allergic reaction to right-wing market libertarianism, I guess. Interesting then to find this article critiquing the 'commoners' approach in terms of the romantic image they purvey of the owner forgetting the corporation: "despite their [ie the corporations'] legal status as individuals, they have no self. Of course corporations plan for the future, but in contrast to individuals, they are biased heavily toward short-term profit. The individuals that compose them at any given moment are under huge pressure to raise profits -- for good reason, as corporations who are not growing are eaten by others that are. A corporation does not know if it will exist in 10 years, or 5. For a corporation, the future itself is part of the commons, and yes, the result is often tragedy."

Markets, etc. | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist Magazine:

Matthew 5:13

"5:13'You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot"

The point of being disciples /prophets of Christ is to act as a preservative of the good and disinfectant of the bad. Now I come to think of it I don't think I have seen any church's mission statement put in terms that seem to echo this saying; yet it seems to me that as the first characterisation that Jesus gives to a band of disciples [=church], we should perhaps take it rather more seriously. What would it mean to take being salt of the earth seriously? First it would mean identifying what was good about society and people around us and striving to hold onto what is good while attempting to resist and push back what is wrong. Just doing it with that attitude of looking for the good first would make such a difference to the killjoy/down-on-everyone image Christians so often have in popular culture. In evangelism too it would mean listening first and identifying what was good and what God was doing in people's lives and trying to make sure that we held on to that before trying to link it up with the good news instead of assuming by our very methodology that people are totally without the good and God in their lives. At the same time our lives must be fundamentally attesting to the goodness, justice and beauty of God otherwise we are merely presenting an ideology [ie a way of looking at things that justifies status quo] instead of a way of being. That's what it means to lose our saltiness, I think.

Crosswalk.com - Matthew 5:13 - 15:

Matthew 5:11-12

"'Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

Change of address from the general to the specific: talking now to those disciples gathered around him. Those who are 'prophets' -like 'Moses' to Christ as 'God'. This personalises to the disciples the teaching of the last beatitude and so the remarks made at that point apply. My question beyond that though is whether we should see the 'great reward in heaven' as a result of the persecution or the persecution as a sign that they /we have a great reward? The difficulty with the former is that it implies a kind of salvation by works. Or does it? Is is the embryo of Paul's teaching about rewards of gold and precious metals versus straw and hay? If the latter, then it must surely be taken as telling us that our capacity for enjoyment of heaven is increased by faithfulness and perseverance. And against the not unnatural possibility of interpreting persecution as a sign that we're on the wrong track we are reminded of a bunch of figures who were doing God's will but got dumped on for it; the prophets.

This is the same insight as lies behind John's "people loved darkness rather than light' and in fact a part of the teaching about 'original' sin. If humans are naturally good, why do we spend so much time resisting the word and perspective of God in our lives? However, if we are naturally evil, how come we can recognise that there might be an issue? The work of the Holy Spirit? Of course but this isn't dualism; redemption implies also an original goodness as well as, in this case, an 'ab initio' corruption. We need to recapture the sense that original sin actually implies an original goodness and rework our cultural expression of 'good news' in the light of it.

Crosswalk.com - Matthew 5:11-12:

How do they do that? -Autistic Savant explains

I'm fascinated by mental abilities and disabilities. A lot of it is about insights into how the mind does and does not work. So this artcle was bound to get my attention, especially for the fascinating insight into 'instant calculation'. What I want to know is what is the mechansism underlying the mental experience? Anywya read this:
"Tammet is calculating 377 multiplied by 795. Actually, he isn't 'calculating': there is nothing conscious about what he is doing. He arrives at the answer instantly. Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. 'When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think.'"

Like some of the scientists studying the phenomena, I can't help but feel "that we all possess the savant's extraordinary abilities - it is just a question of us learning how to access them." One of the reasons things like life coaching and NLP fascinate me. As a child I was always finding little learning tricks and mind games to help me perform better mentally and find myself always somewhat surprised to discover most other people didn't and don't; part of the 'fun' of coaching, for me, is helping people to access stuff that's there but simply they haven't 'wired' themselves to access. So this bit is interesting: "Tammet broke the European record for recalling pi, the mathematical constant, to the furthest decimal point. He found it easy, he says, because he didn't even have to "think". To him, pi isn't an abstract set of digits; it's a visual story, a film projected in front of his eyes." doubly so because it echoes a technique taught by a lot of memory prodigies such as imagining yourself walking through a house and placing objects you want to remember in certain places as you go through. I have also seen logical/mathematical problems reframed as interpersonal relationship which made them instantly soluble whereas the original problem was often quite obscure. We are wired for narrative, and moving through space is clearly part of our lives for millenia of milennia ... Hence the interest to me of the book 'Philosophy in the Flesh' Where the point is that we are embodied beings and our mind emerges fromour bodiliness, hence most of our thinking is actual metaphorical and the metaphors are based in our bodily experience and structure

Some of you may be interested also in this: ""With all those aphorisms," he says, "Chesterton was the Groucho Marx of his day." Tammet is also a Christian, and likes the fact that Chesterton addressed some complex religious ideas. "The other thing I like is that, judging by the descriptions of his home life, I reckon Chesterton was a savant. He couldn't dress himself, and would always forget where he was going. His poor wife." "
.Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | A genius explains:

Child aggression linked to violent media

It's hard to know how this could be otherwise: "They found consistent evidence that young children who watched television and films and played video games with violent content showed more aggressive play and behaviour. There was a definite 'small but significant' effect, which was especially relevant for boys, they said." However, many people have done studies previously failing to uncover links between TV or film violence and actual violence. However, that was not the sme as showing there was no link and now evidence is turning up. To me it makes sense that it would: if one's mind is filled with images and the engagement with the story including violence then our mimetic natures will tend to push us to act out what we've seen ...
SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Health | Child aggression linked to violent media

Linux -you know it makes sense

"estimates that it takes a company approximately one desktop administrator to support 40 Windows PCs, while one administrator can support between 200 and 400 Linux desktops."
Slashdot | Cisco IT Manager Targeting 70% Linux:

Woven PV

"still too clunky. I don't care that I can't charge my computer with a solar jacket -- I could at least trickle-charge my mobile phone. And what about solar curtains for the home -- they don't have to run my house, but they could still feed power back into the grid, passively, day after day. Ultimately, I'd like to see smart, power-generating fabric integrated throughout consumer products, replacing old, static, dead fabric. We don't need to power our society on solar cloth alone -- but that doesn't mean we can't get it to help."

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Woven PV:

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Therapy, Enhancement and the Augmented Society

When people write lyrically about human augmentation and cyborgism I am often turned off because I simply cannot imagine myself or other people wanting to trust ourselves quite so fully to such things as they describe. This is the first article that takes 'my' perspective seriously and weaves some realistic sounding scenarios for developments of neuro-tech and prosthetics. I think too that it shares a useful insight as a starting point: "The city is an augmentation not just of individuals, but of society: it is a construct which allows groups of people to do things which simply not be possible as gatherer-hunter nomads. Cities allowed more people to work together, to differentiate labor and amass never before seen levels of power (and knowledge, and wealth, and religion, and social dislocation, and stratification, and centralization...). Urbanization was humankind's first Singularity. Augmentation and enhancements of our abilities, then, is in reality a fundamental part of who we are, and as old as urban society itself."
Stimulating read; try it.
WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Therapy, Enhancement and the Augmented Society:

Britons are most cultured Europeans

Hard to believe, eh?
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Official: Britons are most cultured Europeans

Sinn F�in crisis over police raids

This really is big news and I can't understand why I've not seen more of it on the BBC: all of a sudden Sinn Fein are looking like a political party fronting for a mafia-like organisation. Now as I write that I realise that this is what Ulster Loyalists have been saying for ages. I felt that they were just rhetorically hyping things for their own political ends but, really the IRA and Sinn Fein don't come out of this at all well. The IRA is supposed to be calling off 'the war' -so what do they need the money for? And more to the point why be involved in crimes at all? There are a lot of us on the 'mainland' who were sympathetic who may find ourselves largely repelled by this development. I had assumed that the accusatiosn that that bank robbery was an IRA job was posturing by the Loyalists and loyalist elements in the NIPS, but now ... major political gaffe boys, major ... did you really think that you could get away with it and still leave the peace process untouched? I am sad that this could have blown apart the main hope for peace in Ireland and sad too that our hopes that the Republican side had matured into real politics seems to have been betrayed. Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Sinn F�in crisis over police raids

Brick wall ?

"Are we simply crash test dummies mimicking sentient beings, about to hit the wall, failing an evolutionary experiment in consciousness and wisdom? Will we brace for impact and watch wasteful lives flash before our eyes? Or will we relax our adherence to the script proselytized by the corporate oligarchy and oil-a-garchies and change our course early enough to prevent innocents from becoming collateral road-kill?"
:

No Nukes Are Good Nukes

Nothing here I've ot said in comments about nuke power on this blog but it's good to have it all on one place.Joel Makower: Two Steps Forward: No Nukes Are Good Nukes

Join a people's campaign to ratify the Kyoto Protoco

US citizens can ratify Kyoto protocol individually. Plese as you do so, think about how to reduce your own ecological footprint.Join a people's campaign to ratify the Kyoto Protocol | By Ross Gelbspan | Grist Magazine | Soapbox | 16 Feb 2005

Fie on you nimbys

"global warming is going to do a lot worse to the environment than just make the coast less scenic, and NIMBY opposition to having their seaside resorts' views 'ruined' by only-visible-on-the-clearest-days windmills on the horizon needs to end. Now."

WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Bill McKibben on Windmills:

Alaska Village Moves from Diesel to 'Micro-Nuke'

More specs and info on that mini nuke reactor. Note the cost; the only way it is a viable option is that the developers are covering the cost of installation etc. Presumably a loss-leader and prototype kind of situation.

Alaskan Town OKs Mini Nuke

Whatever next? Be good to see more info on materials, disposal, lifespan, cost, insurance, safety and risk assessment ....

Gates Unleashes Security Initiatives at RSA

Translation: "M$ software is so full of security holes and unpluggable difficulties that the least we can do to try to keep you from migrating to free and more secure software [ie Linux] is not to fleece you for the software that fixes [some of] our mistakes." ... ?
Gates Unleashes Security Initiatives at RSA

Another GWdenialist put-down

Further evidence that global warming really is happening and that it's humanly originated ....
Times Online - World

Microsoft warns of future security danger

If you weren't yet thinking of dumping M$ windoze then perhaps this article will change your mind. What should make your blood run cold is the phrase "invisible to administrators and to detection tools". No; this isn't a hoax. Try also: RSA: Microsoft on 'rootkits': Be afraid, be very afraid

Nuclear industry plutonium loss

"'Those who argue for a new generation of nuclear power stations ought to reflect on the inability of the industry to ensure the security of the power stations it has already got.'"

See also...

Nuclear industry must explain plutonium loss - Baker (Green Liberal Democrats):

TomPaine.com - No Nukes!

Not the usual envirnomentalist argument against nuke power, rather a more mainstream and economic one.

TomPaine.com - No Nukes!

Can This Black Box See Into the Future?

I came across this project a ocule of years back and I think it's one to watch along with those studies showing that hospital patients who are prayed for do better than those who are not. But this experiment, happened upon by an unlooked-for noticing of a correlation, has been throwing up an interesting set of results for years, to get a flavour for it:
"Not only had they registered the attacks as they actually happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers had begun four hours before the two planes even hit the Twin Towers."
Teihard de Chardin's noosphere, indeed ...
RedNova News - Can This Black Box See Into the Future?:

Matthew 5:10

"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven"

The promise reprises that of the first of the beatitudes, and so marks a completed section of teaching. It is another where th eparadoxical element is prominent: who'd say it was 'lucky' to be persecuted ordinarily? Only a broad enough picture and a long enough time scheme can do so.



However, I am concerned about how easy it is for Chritian's to turn this into a work rather than a gift of 'grace' [bearing in mind the paradox]. Wanting the blessing it is all to easy to seek the persecution and in seeking persectution to actually 'act up' in such a way as to become rather obnoxious and so create the conditions for 'persecution' [actually justified impatience] and so a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling labelling develops. It can even be used to justify acting in ways that are at odds, I think, with the gospel. For example; a few years back in Bradford there were a group of Christians who regualrly preached at passers-by in the main thoroughfares of the city centre. Their words, as far as they could be heard, were largely either incomprehensible to most people or set in such a condemnatory tone and context that they were likely to give the impression that 'gospel' meant 'bad news' rather than 'good news'. Of course any negative reaction to what they were doing was labelled persectution and fuelled redoubled efforts on the basis that they must be doing something right to be perseccuted. Of course what was really happening is that people were simply fed up of being harangued and abused and having their day spoilt by a bunch of people who didn't know when to shut up. I think this anti-gospel because I think that loving ones neighbour in sharing the gsopel must surely be abut caring enough for them to try to do it in ways that they can understand, relate to and enables them to most easily respond without unecessary barriers or luggage.



No, the persecuted ones here are those who are doing right and just and true and beautiful things and finding that it is cutting across the agendas of vested interests rooted in greed, self-aggrandisement or whatever and who are being shafted as a result. In God's perspective they're the lucky ones because they have bought into God's agenda bigtime and God shares God with them.

Crosswalk.com - Matthew 5:10:

The Issues: Fossil Fuel and Energy Use

A useful article about food production in relation to issues of sustainability. Another bookmarkable item, imho. REminds us of the transprt dimensions of food distribution and production which can easily be forgotten.

Sustainable Table: The Issues: Fossil Fuel and Energy Use

42%: 'Churches should be State funded'

It seems that lots of people not only think that the state should fund churches but a lot already think it does. I can attest to having found people during my parsih and university/college ministry who assumed that that's the way it was. Even at a secular university people assumed that the university paid for the chaplains -or at least the CofE one. It seems to be thought natural in a situation of an established shurch.

I would not want the churches to be state funded [though the German model might be interesting in the light of these findings]. However, I think that where the state determines that a church building is an imporatnt piece of heritage and it is beyond the reasonably means of a congregation to keep it up, then I thiunk that there is a case for funding that heritage aspect. That is fairer than tying a group of people to a building that they would otherwise walk away from because it is beyond their meands to curate on behalf of the nation. After all, isn't that what's happened with stately homes... ? The issue thern becomes one of how much modding of the building can be sustained so that the building also is a living contribution to life not just a museum, and there lie a lot of arguments, on present showing.
New research shows 42% say that Churches should be funded by the State | Church of England

Full time HE chaplains needed

Time to hear the axe grinding in the background of this entry: but I am pleased that the CofE genral synod endorsed the view that there should be a full-time chaplain for every Higher Ed institution. And I hope my previous diocese take note of this:
"Bishop Stevenson said that chaplaincy posts have been reduced at a time that colleges and universities were expanding. “This is a matter of considerable concern. Of course, there are real pressures on dioceses and universities to exercise good stewardship of resources,” he said. “However we want to say that chaplains are key agents of God’s mission as they work with their institutions alongside people of all faiths and none -- and we need to encourage them”
Bishop Stevenson pointed out that the church can’t afford not to provide university chaplains. He described them as front-line church workers, building relationships with staff and students, who are often completely ‘unchurched.’ "
However, there is a get-out clause in the part of the motion that refers to this chaplain for every university principle: the clause says. "agree that the Church of England should ensure, where appropriate, that each Higher Education institution is served by at least one whole time Church of England chaplain, to work with ecumenical and multi-faith partners". I'm afraid that the 'where appropriate' is a bit of a weasel-wording. However, I am pleased that the signal is that chaplaincy should be seen as front-line mission. I'm doubly chuffed becasue, behind the scenes, I was one of the main advocates [and arguably the originator of the idea] on the CofE's Higher Ed Chaplains' National Exec, Committee in saying that we should move towards gettting some kind of national policy and strategy on HE chaplaincy so that dioceses like Bradford and Wakefield [yes, I'll name names unlike the coded references in the debate materials] get the message that it is not acceptable to cut chaplaincy to sessional work, and that resources be allocated in such a way as to make it impossible to plead poverty on the issue. Of course that second part is still to be done and hopefully may not be necessary but I was suggeting that the subsidy from central church funds be partially hypothecated on a 'must pay for a full-time Anglican Chaplain [or agreed equivalent]' basis.
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Islamophobia Myth

Judgling by the name of the writer I suspect that it is not easy to write this off as a racially motivated piece. It is an article that should be read by anyone concerned with issues of Islam in Great Britain and how it does or doesn't relate to other faiths and philosophies of life and how it does and doesn't reltae to reasonable and/or unreasonable criticism. I think that there are some strong points made which really deserve thinking about. I am concerned that there a number of Muslims who seem to be trying to find ways to isolate Islamic faith fromthe kind of critique and questions that I as a Christian consider to be normal and reasonable if and when [more to the point] they are directed at me and my faith. I wish these Muslims would realise that they really do look like they have something to hide and be afraid of when they act in this way. I can understand from my own perspective how hurtful and frustrating it can feel to have people misunderstand your beliefs and to misrepresent them [often unwittingly] and to disrespect [wittingly or otherwise] things you hold sacred; but that really is part of living in a society where there is diversity and disagreement. It needs a response of patient explanation and gracious education not finger-wagging outrage -and I do and have -even on this blog- said pretty much the same thing to and of the Christian community and even the Sikhs; so no discrimination there, okay? I may have a Christian-centric view but I still maintain that you cannot work on the basis that everyone should think like you when clearly they do not, 'there is no compulsion in religion' I believe is a Qur'anic sentiment; let's hope that the spirit of that saying infuses Islam more widely than at present. Stifling dissent and uncomfortable views is not a option in a society that is trying not to be repressive. The defensiveness of some Msulims with regard to the content of their faith really looks like insecurity and invites no confidence at all that they believe that their faith can withstand close scrutiny.
FrontPage magazine.com:: Islamophobia Myth by Kenan Malik

Teens know cost of Apples but not milk

In honour of the Kyoto protocol going live, today I preached at a lunch-time Communion in the University of St.John York about the need to take the spirit of the contract and converge to heart. Talking yogether over soup afterwards about how we could do that in practice I menitoned that eating more locally produced food [saving oil on transport costs] it quickly became obvious that for a lot of young people, there wold be some diffiulty about how to prepare and cook fresh locally-produced vegetables which seems to go hand in hand with this: "'Our research demonstrated that while teenagers know the price of desirable items, they have no concept about the cost of everyday goods. Without understanding the true cost of living this next generation are storing up trouble for the future with potentially disastrous consequences.'". They have gad little contact with the processes of shopping for food and cooking. This is sitoring up difficulties in the future for localisation which is very necessary if we are to deal effectively with global warming. I unsuccesfully tried when a Bradford Univesrsity to get basic cooking groups and classes organised for students. I think now that it is mor important than ever to make the effort ...

Another issue in all of this is clearly the individualisation of young people's lives; people sharing kitchens and houses appear not to share in the preparation of food and the buying of it so much, so the trend towards 'TV dinners' out of a freezer are compounded.

It's worrying because of the implications for the duture [not to mention that the price of processed and pre-cooked food is making someone a nice tidy profit that is at the expense, in effect, of people [students] living on debt anyway.
Guardian Unlimited Money | News_ | Teens know cost of Apples but not milk:

Eight years of email stats" ...

sounds like an anorakky thing to do but there is a bit of insight to be had in this basic statistical analysis of emails over a number of years. I think that the most interesting thing is to cost out the timing of dealing with emails. "So there you have my finer-grained interactions 'laid bare'. Allowing ZERO minutes of response time for some finer-grained categories (e.g. semi-junk, self/meta, which don't require reading at all) and ONE-THREE minutes of response times for most categories, plus, say, TEN minutes of response time for an important research category such as 'main project work, paper writing', it is trivially easy to get to 2.5 hours per workday assuming a fairly ruthless, 'one-touch', knee-jerk email interaction regime. And worse if you deviate from the regime."
I can well believe it -there were times when invovled in the university when email must have been getting towards that for me: but there again it was interactions that I would have had other ways possibly involving more time and waiting. So some of it was, for me, actually correlative of a higher or faster workrate.... But it is worth thinking about how e-comms have changed our workhabits and lives.
Eight years of email stats, pass 1: Corante > Get Real >:

Peacemakers

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God."

I have seen some people argue that this is talking about making peace between God and human beings and so this would, in effect, be paraphrased as 'blessed are the evangelists ....'. And I can see that there is a logic to that interprestation and I suspect that it is even a legitimate way of looking at the verse in part. However, I can't see my way to thinking that it is tha main interpretation or the right place to start: it seems evasive of the main point. If we look at the rest of the seromon of the mount we don't find anything else that really supports the 'evangelist' interpretation. We do find, however, a reference to being 'children of your heaven;y father' in conjunction with taking a stance to others which eschews retaliation in favour of loving responses. That allied to the 'obvious' meaning of the term drives me to suggest that we should first take the meaning to be the plain one of those who make peace between humans.



There is something Godly about not retunring evil for evil but rather good. There is something Godly about creating the conditions for harmonious human living together. There is something Godly about reconciling enemies. Further, given the normal biblical resonances of 'peace' as encompassing ideas of welfare and health; more than the absence of conflict; more the promotion of the common good and of conditons that make for human flourishing and making common cause for the welfare of humanity



I guess why a number of Christinas are concerned about this 'direct' interpretation is that it seems to bypass the need for faith in Christ for salvation: it looks like salvation by works. If being a peacemaker leads to being a child of God, then where is the confessing of faith in Christ, baptism etc? I think that this is an important question and ther may be a couple of responses. One response is to note that Jesus is talking to disciples; people who have already [however incohately and undefinedly] put their faith in Christ; and beyond them Jesus via Matthew is addressing those who gathered in Christian house-churches in the first century; the baptised Christian community. So,as with the Law of Moses, this is ethical teaching that presupposes that those who are already are 'saved' are the ones listening. 'Sons of God' is probably a semitism meaning 'likeness to God' rather than making a categorical statement about salvation. So in that perspective what is being said is something like 'Those who are peacemakers are lucky because thay are like God'.



Another response to the issue of it appearing to be a criterion of salvation is to note that it isn't the only place that this kind of thing seems to be the case: Matthew 25 seems to do something similar. It may be that all these things can be dealt with as variants on the theme of 'in house' ethical teaching'. However, I have to confess that I am wondering whether we are being too tied down to response to Christ being in terms of rational-verbal acknowledgements. I want to think further about the possibility that there are salvific responses to Christ that are responses to the work of the Holy Spirit working at a pre-verbal level and are more about the being of God evidenced through what we might call 'values' and shown through behaviour that is conformity with the character of God ... maybe.

Matthew 5.8

What interests me most first here is the way that we mishear/read it straight away; appropriately dealing with this on Valentine's day highlights the difficulty: what is 'heart' about here?

We modern westerners hear it as 'the emotional centre of our life'. Jesus's Palestinian compatriots almost certainly thought of the heart as the intellectual and willing centre of their lives. This probably means that we should link this saying with the stuff later on in the sermon on the mount about not serving two masters and the eye being 'single'. In other words its probably about giving God a willed and 'intelligent' dedication of ourselves [offering our bodies as living sacrifices? Rm.12.1-2].



I used to have a badge which made me smile. It read: "Blessed are the pure in heart -they have so much more to talk about!"

And I kind of stick by that: except that purity that is meant there is more to do with not being dirty-minded, I think, which is a whole other set of issues.



Less time to blog today so I'll leave it at that.

Crosswalk.com - Matthew 5:8

Matthew 5.7

[check out www.rawvision.com/back/wtthompson for picture details]
"Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy."
"You're blessed when you care. At the moment of being 'carefull,' you find yourselves cared for." [The Message].
Links so well to the phrase in the Lord's prayer about being forgiven as we forgive others. It must be one of the most persistant themes of Jesus' teaching, as we find it in the gospels, and yet for all that it seems to be very underrepresented in contemporary CHristian teaching and practice. I take it that the thrust of what Jesus is teaching through this is that when we participate in the divine 'economy' it is literally non-sense to expect that forgiveness can be received but can be withheld. If we think that we are participating in a logic which is not of God's Kindom; it is alien to God's way of being and doing. It's not that we earn forgivness by forgiving; it's that by being merciful people we will simply be the kind of people who will receive, are received will have received mercy. Mercy begets mercy begets mercy begets mercy ... Like love of which it is an expression.

'Mercy' is to withhold from someone some 'punishment' they deserve, mercy is to 'swallow' the pain/pride etc that it costs rather than pass it on to the 'miserable' [ie the person who is the object of mercy]. Forgiveness if it truly is forgiveness is never free; it costs the forgiver, the merciful; if it doesn't cost, it isn't forgiveness, it isn't mercy. At least so it seems to me; perhaps I'm missing something here. It further seems to me that perhaps this is a crucial thing about the atonement: it is the spacetime demonstration of God 'swallowing' the cost and pride to forgive a miserable humanity ... That's why God can't just forgive without paying a price; it isn't forgiveness otherwise: if God is not 'hurt' by our sin, then there is no sin, ultimately; there is just pain and suffering as of the brute beasts of the field.

The participatory notion of an economy of mercy gets scant liturgical recognition either: where are the penetiential litanies that encourage worshippers to forgive? [I know of only one where God is asked to forgive our persecutors -the Anglican great 'litany']. Where in our normal weekly and daily prayers do we find the equivalent of 'forgive us -as we forgive ...'? Where is the preaching on how to forgive and to participate actively in the economy of mercy? I'm not saying it isn't there, but compare how much we see Jesus teaching about forgiving others with, say, how much he teaches on sexual probity and then compare those proportions with what our churches are doing; with what we are doing. And yet, if my expereicne as a congregation member and as a minister is anything to go by, I know which of the two causes the greatest trouble and the hardest heartache -and it isn't sexual improprieties. I challenge you and the churches to disicpline themselves to dealing with lack of forgiveness with four times the energy and time that we/they give to matters sexual ... that alone would make the world a better place.

Matthew 5.6

"Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled."
For me this appears to be more straightforward to interpret than the previous three beatitudes. Hungering and thirsting are straightforward metaphors for strongly desiring using the experience of fasting or want as the source domain and spiritual desire for God as the target. And the metaphor continues; taking the idea of being filled with food into the domain of spiritual desire.
There is of course the incongruity of calling those who experience want as being blessed/lucky and there is the question of when they will be filled: is this an fulfilment-of-the-Times promise or something that is meant to be this worldly? Or something of both? CLearly the luckiness/blessedness of wanting rightness-with-God is that this is a desire that God wants to fulfill, and I relate this to St.Augustine of Hippo writing in Confessions, book one, "O God you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you".
What does it mean to hunger and thirst for righteousness. I guess that it is saying 'God is to die for' and meaning it; it suggests a desperate desire for God that,like hunger and thirst, makes it hard for someone to think of anything else and tends to turn all their actions towards keeping open the possibility of sating the hunger or slaking the thirst.

All of which makes me think that perhaps the being filled is both now and not-yet. The description I have just written of what I think the metaphors suggest, puts me in mind of the way that life often is for a Christian: an experience of finding thoughts of God turning up in everyday life of desiring to turn all of life into communion with God and also finding there are times when the communion is experienced and yet there are times when the desire is present without apparantly being fulfilled. I guess if we're honest there are also times when the appetite seems to have gone or we have found ways to drown it out and even to distract ourselves from it.

It seems to me also that it is important to note that the implication of this teaching of Christ is that desire is not wrong. SOme Christian teaching seems to look on desire as of the devil or the Fall. It clearly is not; in God's economy desire is there to draw us into communion with God and with other people and indeed with the world God has made. It is the distortion of desire into greed, self-aggrandisement, exploitation, self-abnegation and so on that is the problem. It is when we desire a piece of fruit in contrariness to the will of God that the trouble sets in...

Matthew 5.5

"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth"
This is one of those phrases that most clearly turns the way that the world thinks on its head. It can often seem that those who are pushy and self-aggrandising get noticed and are prepared to push others out of the way so that they get resources, attention, gory or favour. But I want to question our assumption that the phrase marks a stark contrast between Jesus's way and the rest. You see: I'm just not convinced that everyone is out to live by the mean, pushy self-aggrandising paradigm. And I'm pretty sure that pretending that they do is not going to help us commend the gospel to our neighbours. What seems to me more obvious nowadays is that the self-assertion, bullying, 'chav' way of doing things leads away from 'inheriting the earth'. We live corporately and our welfare in the long term lies in the give-and-take of community; being prepared to serve others and to wait in a queue and generally be co-operative in our ways. Those who do not, in the end find that they are defeated or that their gains made by bullying and self-assertion can only be held onto by having a group of people with whom they co-operate; thus mimicking the very system that they have parasited from. For such self-assertion is always parasitical on a system where 'meekness' is the norm: from the nurture of family and friends to the infrastructure of tangible society; roads and education and hospitals and food distribution and entertainment and the list goes on. None of this can exist unless we are prepared to be meek enough to make our contribution and play our part and offer our service appropriately. The meek will inherit the earth because that is the nature of things; the goodness of creation asserting itself to provide the norm and a backdrop for life and, tragically the possibility of evil exploiting those good and beneficial norms. Jesus's words are a warning that parasitic self-assertion is ultimately self-defeating -even an enlightened self-interest should take a long-term view. Love is more ultimate than its detractors.

I also want to question what we so often seem to mean by 'meek'. And I do so because I am convinced that we need to learn from 'assertiveness' and I am aware that many Christians and others react with suspicion when introduced to the ideas of assertiveness because we have a view of meekness and humility which is akin to being a doormat; and assertiveness-thinking challenges that very firmly. I want to affirm that assertiveness, properly understood, is a Christian self-discipline or at least a self-discipline that is compatible with and even informative of Christian thinking.

Assertiveness sees itself avoiding the polar opposites of bullying and getting ones own way on one side and being a doormat on the other. Now, why is being a door-mat a problem? because it involves allowing wrong things to go on unchallenged, because it is not respecting oneself [which is part of the proper self love implied in loving ones neighbour as oneself and is disrespecting God's love of oneself] and because it is failing to respect the other person, ultimately. The aim is to be able to speak up for ones own viewpoint or for that of others without aggression. It means trying to insist that the rights and respect of others in addition to the 'aggressor' are recognised. This 'meekness' is like that described by William Barclay in his description of the meaning of words in the Greek New Testament; the work used of a horse which had bit and bridle: such a horse is described as 'meek'; power under control.

How does this square with the stuff later on in the sermon on the mount about turning the other cheek? Well first of all I have to say that turning the other cheek is probably quite an assertive action if Walter Wink is right in suggesting its historical context of inviting a soldier who had used the derogatory backhanded slap is by the offering of the right [unslapped] cheek being invited to consider the assaultee an equal: worthy of an open-handed slap. I would also suggest that it is framed in the overarching ethic of loving ones enemy: what actions and responses could I/we make that will serve to redeem this aggressor ? I believe that the assertive attitude, by refusing to collude with the aggressor's injustice or to let it go unchallenged, is a way of loving the enemy. Meekness however, may judge it prudent also to wait ... and leave it to God to make an opportunity to bring that person to repentance. Meekness can do that too.