Watching The Brain Switch Off 'Self'

This is a significant little finding about the way that our sense of self has a neuronally visible correlate and therefore it can be seen with appropriate equipment to go dark in some circumstances. The research team wrote up their conclusions in this way.

We propose that the role of self-related cortex is not in enabling perceptual awareness, but rather in allowing the individual to reflect upon sensory experiences, to judge their possible significance to the self, and, not less importantly for consciousness research, to allow the individual to report about the occurrence of his or her sensory experience to the outside world.
To conclude, the picture that emerges from the present results is that, during intense perceptual engagement, all neuronal resources are focused on sensory cortex, and the distracting self-related cortex is inactive. Thus, the term "losing yourself" receives here a clear neuronal correlate. This theme has a tantalizing echoing in Eastern philosophies such as Zen teachings, which emphasize the need to enter into a 'mindless,' selfless mental state to achieve a true sense of reality,

What I find interesting is the automatic correlation of this to eastern mystical practice, as if western correlates didn't exist. Clearly they are unknown to these researchers which indicates that Christian meditative practice is virtually unknown. In fact, I would argue that this experience may not be best understood in the terms attributed to Zen in the paragraph above which I take to be alluding to the 'mindlessness' aimed for in Buddhist teaching. However, the fact is that the 'loss of self' is achieved by intense focus on something else which is more akin to contemplative aims than 'mindlessness' as I understand it.

That said, I'm pretty certain that I have experienced this kind of state playing soccer and doing art work ...
ScienceDaily: Watching The Brain Switch Off 'Self'
Filed in: brain, mind, meditation, research, Self

Youth gap: what the BBC and the Church share

It seems that the BBC shares a problem with the church in the UK, they both seem to be failing to reach young adults.

the BBC was in real danger of losing touch with tomorrow's licence-fee payers; tech-savvy 16-24-year-olds who feel little affinity with its output and consume content in ways their parents wouldn't begin to understand. Research found that 60 per cent of 16-24-year-olds watch less than three hours of BBC television a week.

It is a matter of culture, and perhaps watching what market driven-cultural industries do is part of the learning we can both do. That's not to say that I would have us emulate the antics of the market, since I think that there are some deeply problematic things about it [for a clue as to what I think those are you could look over one of my recent posts]. But I would say that the clues we can gain about cultural change and the way that perceptions are moulded and change is important. Cultural reading and media literacy should be part of Christian formation in a broad way, and I don't mean that right-wing stuff thinly disguised as Christian cultural critique which owes more to the values of tyranny than to the gospel of peace.

On a final, oblique note. Perhaps the reply to the sneering comments from journalists about falling numbers in churches is to remind them that newspapers and television journalism seem to share the same problem ... And that some churches seem to be bucking that trend.
The Observer | Business | The BBC's digital future - but will it work?:
Filed in: BBC, youth, gap, market_share

A greener driving test

driving test candidates will in future have to show they can save fuel as well. Fuel efficiency - or eco-driving - is to be made part of the driving test from 2008

Of course the numbers taking their test in any year is a drop in the ocean beside the 30 million drivers in this country, so let's hope that this is not the only fuel efficiency measure that the government are going to be promoting with regard to cars. The article takes to heart the 30 million people already licensed and offers tips on driving more fuel-efficiently:

Drive more smoothly: harsh accelerating and braking use up much more fuel
· Avoid excessive speed, especially on motorways
· Watch ahead to anticipate when to slow down or stop well in advance
· Change gear as soon as possible, ideally around 1,500-2,500 revs
· Once the engine is warm, turn it off if you are going to stop for longer than a minute
· Keep tyre pressure at right level
· Take any excess baggage out of the car, and racks and boxes off the roof
· Switch off or turn down air conditioning and heating
· Avoid unnecessary trips
· Buy a more efficient car

There are also some interesting titbits in the article such as:

The Lib Dems will push to raise the top car tax rate from £210 to £2,000 for the most polluting vehicles, including many 4x4s and BMW 7 series models this week. The move, which would apply only to vehicles being registered for the first time, will be launched as an amendment to the finance bill, which puts the Budget into law. It will be seen as a bid to embarrass Labour and the Tories into backing them or having to defend their opposition while vying for the green vote.

Which may be interesting if they can pull it off.

question is whether drivers will bother to change their habits when the average saving will be about £2 a week - less than the price of a large cup of coffee in many cities....
However, the EST said that smoother drivers also save on wear and tear, and less regular services for their vehicles.

There's also a link to a quiz on how green is your driving... as a non-driver, I'm not qualified to comment on that.
The Observer | UK News | Now drivers have to pass green test:
Filed in: driving, car, environment, CO2, licence

ID Card function creep begins ...

... and they haven't even issued them yet! Worryingly, it represents a turn around on assurances and further population surveillance, in effect.
ID Card database to be used as population register | The Register
Filed in: ID_cards, UK, function-creep

Gernika Picasso and politics

Picasso's famous painting which has been an icon of the horror of modern warfare is part of a row about the political and regional shape of Spain because the picture is not currently allowed to be shown in Euskadi which is where 'Guernica'/Gernika is. It'll be interesting to see where this goes now that a peace process seems to be underway in northwest Spain /Euskadi.
"in the Basque country the main nationalist party and the main conservative party have joined forces with other Spanish politicians in calling for Guernica... to be taken from Madrid. It would be very foolish of those who control the painting, no matter how fragile its state, to allow it to become a symbol of Spanish centralism. The campaign to hand it over, for however brief a time, is likely to become a great Basque rallying cause the longer it goes on."

Guardian Unlimited Arts | | The art of war:

Family of Five minus Car = Good Blogging

A moment of hope for the world as USAmericans learn to live without the car... As a carless person in a carless family, I was pleased to see this and that people are posting about the experience for the help and encouragement of others. Hats off to them.
[Family of Five No Car = Good Blogging] � Radical Congruency
Filed in: carless, lifestyle

Starlings Learn 'Human-only' Syntax Patterns

Some linguists have suggested that embedded recursive grammatical structures are distinctively human. Research with starlings suggests otherwise.

The finding that starlings can grasp even these simple grammatical rules, Gentner said, suggests that humans and other animals share basic levels of pattern recognition and also hints at the likelihood of other cognitive abilities we have in common. "There might be no single property or processing capacity," Gentner and coauthors write, "that marks the many ways in which the complexity and detail of human language differs from non-human communication systems."

However, what they do appear to be unable to do is generate new instanciations. Which I would have thought would have been the very basic of 'real' language: generativity.
ScienceDaily: The Birds And The B's: Challenging Chomsky, Starlings Learn 'Human-only' Syntax Patterns:
Filed in: linguistics, pattern, animals, grammar, rules

elegant wind power has arrived...quietrevolution

Some of the designs here are really nice; elegant is indeed the word. This is mid-range generation: too big for a single household but not full industrial level either could work for blocks of flats or terraces, though, if a good model for sharing is found.
elegant wind power has arrived...quietrevolution

First hydrogen powered city?

Denmark could have the world's first hydrogen city if these plans come to fruition quickly enough. The pictures, though, remind me of 1970's scifi book covers, which doesn't make me feel that it is going to happen in reality.
Inhabitat � Blog Archive � WORLD’S FIRST HYDROGEN CITY
Filed in: hydregen, energy, urban, planning

Labyrinth workshop

On Monday I'm leading a couple of workshops on labyrinth for the Diocese of Bradford's "Yes to yound people" day. I've called the workshop "The long and winding road that leads to God's door", with a hat tip to the Beatles for the title, of course.

Here are some good leads for further exploration of labyrinths.
Wikipedia article
Contemplative youth ministry
Grace Cathedral SF Ca. on their labyrinth ministry
.Online Labyrinth based on the BYFC one that Jonny Baker promoted using stations of guided multimedia meditations. See also here.
A good general site.
There's even a Labyrinth society with useful things on their site
The labyrinth can be 'walked' with your fingers ... And if you would like to do it on screen without having to grease your screen with your finger marks, this site is rather nice.

Books I have found helpful on labyrinths
Exploring the Labyrinth: A Guide for Healing and Spiritual Growth Melissa Gayle West
Labyrinths by Candolini which is a kind of travelogue of European labyrinths including British which informs us about labyrinth walking via a travel narrative.

mustitasking is a moral weakness?

I think that this phrase makes good shock copy but as I slowed down myself in Lent this year I began to reflect on this slogan of the slow movement. One of my actions was that when I ate alone, I would concentrate on eating without doing something else as well, like watching tele or listening to the radio or reading a book or a newspaper. I have been an inveterate multitasker [women readers please note!] driven often by the evangelical notion of 'redeeming the time'. So this action was to break a long-standing habit backed by a spiritual imperitive. One of the reasons for doing it, though, also went back to the commendation of a former spiritual director of mine, who suggested that as I am a MBTI 'N', that it may do me spiritual good to do something in an 'S' manner, and the specific suggestion was to eat slowly and taste, smell and feel my food as I ate: to attend to the sensations of eating. I found it interesting to note how hard this could be; my mind would wander into woolgathering, and even the lack of outside-driven multitasking agents did not stop my inner chatter crowding out the simple sensations of eating over time. I guess that it would be a matter of practicing to attend to simple sensations for increasingly longer periods of time ...

However, be that as it may, I got to thinking about 'multitasking is a moral weakness'. It needs to be taken as a challenge, not an absolute truth. We rely on various forms of multitasking to live: our brains need to control all sorts of automatic and semi automatic actions unconsciously in order to make sure that we can attend to potentially life-threatening situations without simple control being compromised [eg not having to consciously think about brakes or steering while deciding how to avoid a tricky road situation is a decided advantage in aiding sufficiently rapid responses]. Also, it is not a moral weakness for me, in a pastoral interview, to be listening to someone's words and also their body language while assessing whether these match up with the content of their words and indeed assessing whether we have the time to complete processing the new information before our time runs out and the kids return from school, say ...

What is being challenged is the idea that busyness is somehow automatically a good thing. Maggi Dawn quotes a useful piece from 'In Praise of Slow':

The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between. Being Slow means never rushing, never striving to save time just for the sake of it. It means remaining calm and unflustered even when circumstances force us to speed up

It's an attitude that I have found needs challenging in many clergy circles. Clergy, perhaps because so much of their work is unseen of necessity, can be prone to the temptations of justification by works which tends to make them vulnerable to trying to do many things at once, multitasking becomes a proof of productivity and value and a counter in the games of moral blackmail over church work we can end up playing [we are all so busy, you can't ask any more of us] because we haven't in so many churches learned to communally value vocation and so can't or won't make decisions based on calling rather than expediency.

And yet what people most want from us is help to live the way that the quote points to.
It means reinventing the way we do church, I think.

maggi dawn: In praise of SLOW

Amateur hacker shows ID card problems

Read this on an amateur hacker who managed to break into top US and UK government IT systems:

He said it was easy, despite being only a rank amateur. Using the hacking name "Solo," he discovered that many U.S. top-security systems were using an insecure Microsoft Windows program and had no password protection at all.
"So I got commercially available off-the-shelf software and used them to scan large military networks ... anything I thought might have possible links to UFO information," he said.

And now tell me you feel that your data would be safe with the National Identity Register and that you will be more secure with identity cards. To me it looks like centralising all important data in a government service is asking for trouble.

Wired News: Terrorist or UFO Truth Seeker?:
Filed in: IT, security, hackers, government, ID_cards

Liquid Life: Zygmunt Bauman

This follows up on his other 'liquid' books but is more focused on the effects of 'liquid modernity' on individuals. It reads more as a series of essays than a whole thesis and feels more like a completing of the thesis of Liquid Modernity by tying up various loose ends than adding anything substantially new. However, it can be useful to see the working out of the thesis to confirm the feel that one may already have gained for the ideas. I like the way that Bauman links the individual with the global and the identification of the 'new' classes in a globalised world.

There is a lot about identity in this book, and rightly so. As such it deserves to be read and thought about by people working with others in arenas concerned with growth, development and learning. I certainly found much to think about in respect of spiritual direction and life coaching as well as prospectively thinking about teaching teenagers. It is also important, in my view, in helping us to identify the gospel tasks of proclamation and spiritual formation in a consumer culture. I felt offirmed in my intuition that issues of loyalty in the sense of learning to let ourselves be formed in identity by a primary loyalty to God in Christ are crucial. The consumerist mindset brooks no opposition to the idea that identity is fluid and that all loyalties are therefore provisional. We cannot allow a loyalty to Christ to be seen in that way. This is the fundamental clash, I suspect, between Christ and culture for the west. However, the thing that we can affirm about it is the way that it does provisionalise all other loyalties which I think is a mindset that is helpful as we learn to contextualise our proclamation of Christ.
Amazon.co.uk:� Liquid Life: Amazon.co.uk:

Judge's secret Da Vinci code

This particular jouralist was reading the judge's final pronouncement from the case of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail against Dan Brown of the Da Vinci Code. He writes,

while reading the judgment, I noticed something odd. Throughout the text, the occasional letter has been italicised. There was an "m" in the word claimant in the second paragraph, and an "i" and a "t" italicised in the next. I supposed it was simply a word processing fault. but I did not seriously consider that the judge could have implanted a hidden message in the judgment. High court judges simply do not do such things.

It then transpires that the judge in this case has a bit of a sense of fun because that is precisely what he had done. I can't help feeling that he missed an opportunity to say something a bit more significant in the grand scheme of things; something like a clue to buried treasure or something, but the fact that it was there was interesting. It seems implausible that a judge might do this, but then again: there you are listening to loads of evidence about hidden messages and codes and the like and after a week or two it must start to get inside your head quite a bit. I could see this as a way of trying to get the thing out of your system. Of course, the significant thing here is to ask what the judge would have done if no-one had noticed. The indications are that the lack of 'pick-up' was concerning him.

The next question is what will I do if people don't with my own response here?

Guardian Unlimited Books | News | How judge's secret Da Vinci code was cracked
Filed in: Da_Vinci_code, copyright, judgement

Aramaic Lord's prayer

The Lord's prayer in Aramaic continues to be one of the more visited entries on this blog and in following up some traffic related to it I happened on the site referenced in the title link. It's good because it gives the background to the matter. It's clear too that the supposed translations that abound really are amplified paraphrases with an ideological bent that may not suit the original teaching of Christ [much though I like some bits of some of them]. The more so if they are translations of the translations back into Aramaic from the Greek text ... Anyway, have a look if you are interested in some of the textual and historical issues.
Historian web site
Abwun d'bashmaya image products
Filed in: Lord's_Prayer Aramaic Greek Hebrew gospels
See also http://abbeynous.schtuff.com/weblinks_general

Where Christianity faces a fight to survive

You've probably heard of 'rice Christians'; people who, in the bad old days of British empire, notionally converted to Christianity to gain material benefits or to improve their econonmic position. This article starts by looking at what we might dub 'rice Muslims'. However, the article goes on to report the issue of conversions also to Christian faith in Pakistan, ending with this interesting titbit.

In Pakistan, conversion is technically legal but those who do convert are dubbed "apostates" and often killed. Christian officials describe a large community of "secret Christians" made up of some government officials and prominent people who have converted to Christianity.

I for one, will be praying for these secret believers.
Telegraph | News | Where Christianity faces a fight to survive:
Filed in: Christian, Islam, religion, conversion, Pakistan

The Next Green Revolution

This captures and important insight for me:

Americans trash the planet not because we're evil, but because the industrial systems we've devised leave no other choice. Our ranch houses and high-rises, factories and farms, freeways and power plants were conceived before we had a clue how the planet works. They're primitive inventions designed by people who didn't fully grasp the consequences of their actions.

It's what led me to set up a blog called 'The Greening', to try to document the struggles towards a set of human governance and living social systems which work with the ecosystem rather than against it. I am tired of the way that the only way to be more personally eco-friendly is to be prepared to pay more. It shouldn't be a hobby for those with the money or the possibility of dropping out: it should be the way things are...

This article then goes on to summarise, in effect, the thesis of 'Natural Capitalism' which is a hopeful reading of necessary changes which could occur 'naturally' in a capitalist system...
Wired 14.05: The Next Green Revolution:
Filed in: environment, society, culture, Powers, technology

Girls Have Big Advantage Over Boys On Timed Tests

We already know that hormones cause structural differences between male and female brains and seem to be implicated in 'emotional intelligence' to some degree. Anyway, this one has clear educational import and that is spelt out clearly.

To truly understand a person's overall ability, it is important to also look at performance in un-timed situations. For males, this means presenting them with material that is challenging and interesting, but is presented in smaller chunks without strict time limits.

ScienceDaily: Girls Have Big Advantage Over Boys On Timed Tests:
Filed in: education, gender, teens, information, thinking

The Rise Of Bright Green Computers

Computers are not the greenest machines, but there is hope and there are developments on the way which could scale up and make huge differences. This World-changing article overviews the issues and the developments. Worth a quick read in my opinion.
WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: The Rise Of Bright Green Computers
Filed in: PC's, recycling, power, materials, environment, economics

Alt Worship and emergent stuff

When I first started reading things about 'emerging church' I was confused. It sounded a bit like alternative worship only not. Perhaps it was a bit wider in scope of forms but was/is it really that different? Well, I think Jonny Baker in the referenced interview here probably speaks for me:

I think alternative worship preceded the emerging church discussion by several years, at least in the UK. Emerging church felt like other sections of the church catching up to be honest. Alternative worship had been having discussions about postmodernity, contextual mission, reading liberation, black, and feminist theologians and re-theologising as a result, reading biblical scholars, drawing from contemporary culture and art, re-embracing ritual and the traditions of the church and so on. Alternative worship was always a very radical movement – it felt as though emerging church afforded another way of talking about things that might be more accessible to a wider group of people and to the mainstream church who were never going to embrace some aspects of alternative worship.

I kind of feel vindicated; that the stuff we'd been up to and reflecting on really was the same kind of thing. Perhaps the packaging and the 'sociological' factors are different in that altworship ended up often serving those who could no longer culturally cope with inherited church rather than being truly missional, it could often be a holding operation for those who might otherwise drop out unable to handle the cultural dissonance.

(e)mergent Voyageurs :: Interview with Jonny Baker:
Filed in: altworship, emerging, church, mission, pomo

Homo loquens coram Deo

This is a project that's been in my mind for a couple of years now. I want to set aside a bit of time and effort to reflect on theological anthropology as a linguist. By 'linguist' I mean 'linguistic scientist', that is someone who studies language not simply particular languages [though that is part of it] but the phenomenon of language. Now I'm not current in my reading, but my first degree was in linguistics and I realised that I still tend to use the grounding I have and think about things linguistically. So I have been thinking in little bits about things like the first chapters of Genesis and musing over them vithe the questions and general knowledge that comes from a linguistic science perspective. I think that this will mean paying attention to the way that language is attributed to God, the way that language functions in a created being, the matter of the image of God in relation to the nature of language, the issue of finitude and infinity in relation to meaning-making and hermeneutics, language and culture and even language and the Powers ...

It'll therefore probably be rather occasional. I had thought about starting a new blog on the topic but I suspect that it would be too occasional to make that worthwhile. Originally I was thinking in terms of an essay of five to ten thousand words.

Any way, the idea is that each post will be called 'homo loquens coram Deo" [speaking humanity before God] with a further identifier of either a number or a word or two. I am thinking of starting with this passage.

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"

Wikipedia on Linguistics:
Filed in: language, God, humanity, theology

Tohu w bohu

Happened to be looking through CD's today and came across this album cover.

I had heard of "Godspeed you! Black Emperor". Wondering why the Hebrew for "Formless and void" is on the front ... nice graphic though.
godspeed you! black emperor

More than money

These experiments show that it is possible to structure situations that bring about better societies. “It was about how people are sometimes confused, succumb to temptation and care about others,” said Camerer about his talk at Davos. “The theory that all people are always out for themselves — the naive theory of economic man — is wrong. The thing that makes this viewpoint wrong is that a large percentage of people are reciprocal,” he said.
“We now understand a lot mathematically about how self-interest and reciprocity interact and how changing the economic rules of the game can create situations in which the reciprocity motive gets even the most selfish people to play along and act reciprocally, to everyone’s benefit.”

It is hopeful that economists seem to be getting past the 'autistic' assumptions that I was taught as the basics of the 'science' of economics...
Science & Theology News - More than money:
Filed in: economics, altruism, psychology, society, reciprocity, benefit

Da VInci Code and the hermeneutic of suspicion

Rowan Williams preached what seems to have been a really helpful sermon which relates to the hermeneutic of suspicion which works so powerfully through our culture and is identifiably one of the currents floating the success of the Da Vinci Code.

So the New Testament is not a collection of books with a single tight agenda that works on behalf of a powerful elite; it is the product of a community of people living at great risk and doing so because they sense themselves compelled by a mystery and presence that is completely authoritative for them – the presence of Jesus. They have been convinced that being in the company of Jesus is the way to become fully and effectively human. They are discovering how to live together without greed, fear and suspicion because of his company. They believe that they’ve been given the gift of showing the world what justice and mutual service and gratitude might look like in a world that is a very dangerous place because of our incapacity for these things. They take the risks because they believe they have been entrusted with a promise.

Whatever this is, it is not about cover-ups, not about the secret agenda of power; it may be nonsense to you, it may be unreal to you, but don’t be deceived about the nature of the message and those who lived it out in the days when the New Testament was being written. And that’s why if we want to know what it is about today, we need to turn to the people who are taking the same risks, struggling with the same mystery. We need to look at the martyrs and the mystics.

It's a good response though it wouldn't quite satisfy the seeker/questioner who is aware of the role of the church of the Nicene period in accepting the NT writings and not other writings; the hermeneutic of suspicion applies to the selection rather than the writing. However, drawing attention to the writing and it's life situations is a good move in letting what these writers wrote be heard above the din of suspicion.

Archbishop of Canterbury | Sermons and Speeches: Filed in: Rowan_Williams, Da_Vinci_Code, NT, Christian, apologetics

Britain starts eating the planet on Sunday 16 April

This is another way of thinking about the concepts lying behind the metaphor of the ecological footprint. In this case the metaphor [if that's the right term] is drawn from the financial world of tax payment where the amount of weeks that the average tax burden takes to pay are lumped together and then a day is declared when you start working for yourself. Well here, its lumping together the days when the UK feeds itself and then declares a day when we start eating the rest of the planet -which was Easter Sunday. Some interesting thoughts here which could be useful in those pub-like debates we get caught up in...

"If the whole world had wanted to share UKlifestyles in 1961, the Earth would just have managed with its available resources – one planet would have been enough,” says Andrew Simms, lead author of the report and nef policy director, “Today, if the whole world wanted lifestyles like those enjoyed in the UK, we would need 3.1 planets."

The report at the back of this is tracing the interdependence of the world economy and there are some disturbing factoids to be seen:

in 2004:

* We imported 465 tonnes of gingerbread and exported almost the same volume, 460 tonnes
* We sent 1,500 tonnes of fresh potatoes to Germany, and brought in 1,500 tonnes of fresh potatoes back from the same place
* We imported 44,000 tonnes of frozen boneless chicken cuts and exported 51, 000 tonnes of fresh boneless chicken
* We sent 10,200 tonnes of milk and cream to France, and imported 9,900 tonnes from France
* We imported 391,432 tonnes of chocolate and exported 170,652 tonnes

All that redundancy in transport can't be good. It points to the need for sensible pricing of transport globally.
Britain starts eating the planet on Sunday 16 April
Filed in: environment, UK, footprint, NEF

ZoomClouds

You may have noticed the appearance on this blog of a tag cloud in the right-hand column. If you want one for your blog then go to
ZoomClouds.
It shows the 30 most used words on my posts for the last 7 days. The settings may change, I may go to a month's view and vary the number of words shown ...
Filed in: tags, web2.0, cloud, blog

The collective art of being church

It's not a new idea [even if the author may think it is] but it is worthwhile noting this discussion starter article on 'church as art collective'. There's a lot to commend the model which was much vaunted in AltWorship circles in the late 1990's. The downside of the model is the high degree of time commitment it requires, a factor which led me to develop worship in a more at-the-time participatory direction in Chaplaincy [our community didn't have the time or resources to be a kind of art collective]; that is the service itself is maximally participatory in a multi-sensory, multiple intelligence sort of way.
The art of being church | open source theology
Filed in: art, church, governance, altworship

Wisdom likes company

Further scientific support for the "Wisdom of Crowds". I was particularly interested in the comments on numbers: two may be company, but three is a crowd in the 'wisdom of crowds' sense.

groups of two performed at the same level as the best of two individuals, suggesting that this group size was too small to introduce the necessary dynamics for optimal problem-solving. However, since groups of three, four, and five were able to achieve the same results, the authors submit that groups of at least three are necessary and sufficient to perform better than the best of an equivalent number of individuals on complex problems that require understanding of verbal, quantitative, or logical conceptual systems.

What is needed to be said beyond this is what the 'Wisdom of Crowds' points out: that this is not automatic; there have to be certain conditions to do with equality, openness and non-hierarchality present.

And I am left musing over the Trinitarian thing in this too...
ScienceDaily: Groups Perform Better Than The Best Individuals At Solving Complex Problems
Filed in: groups, problem-solving, emergence, Powers

special missionary to 'godless' Telford

This is for me an inspiring story, especially to find in a secular paper. I read it and thought: "that's what I want to do"; then "shucks; he's getting paid for it!"

The article deals with all sorts of peops who are swimming against the tide and in the midst of it is this...

Mark Berry has a tricky mission. The son of a vicar, he has been charged with taking the word of God into the area the Church of England judges the most secular on the map. That place is Telford, in Shropshire, whose inhabitants know the town's spired shopping centre as "Telford Cathedral".

So there's a double interest here because I was brought up only about 10 miles away and went to sixth form college in Telford.

On the day Mark moved his wife, crucifix, child and cat into a small terraced house in the town (bought by the Church Mission Society and the local diocese), he was visited by a neighbour, who said, "Your tree is casting a shadow on my house and it's bad for the feng shui." "That's the sort of spiritual dabbling that's going on here," says Mark, 36. "When they talk about spirituality, things like Christianity, the church and institutional religion don't seem to enter the picture at all." More than 99% of Telfordians are "unchurched" and Mark's seven-year assignment, in which he answers to the Bishop of Shrewsbury, is to do something about it.

In a ceremony in one of the town's parks, Mark was appointed a licensed lay minister and anointed with oil beside a sign announcing "Telford: the final frontier". Five days later, not least because of the bishop's expectation that "I should get my butt into gear, rather than sitting around watching Sky Sports", he decided to "put a little colour on the canvas". He took his Vespa into town and left leaflets in libraries, inviting Telfordians to a local pub if they wished to "breathe, think, drink, wait, feel, touch, love, shout, scream, cry, laugh... reach for God".

At the library Mark had found out about a local "mind, body, spirit fayre", so he booked a stall among the exponents of tarot, psychic art, reiki, paganism and hypnosis. "I didn't storm in and say, 'Right, you're a bunch of heathen sinners'," he recalls. "I just listened and gave a lot of confirmation. I pushed my leaflets to the back and laid out lots of floor cushions. A crystal healer told me, 'We've been waiting for the church to get involved for years. But of course you know that the Son of God was an invention of Constantine?' I spoke to a Wiccan girl who believes everything has a spirit and I asked, 'When a rock breaks down into sand, does one spirit become millions?' That was pretty cool."

Hearing that he'd been discussed in the fan forum of Telford Football Club, Mark began posting in it himself, quoting from the Eurythmics song Missionary Man; then he recreated his pub meeting idea as the Chill Space at Joshua's Bar in the stadium. "You don't really find opportunities to talk about Jesus at a match," he admits, "but Jesus tells the parable about the kingdom of God being like a bit of yeast hidden in flour, and I feel like a little bit of yeast in the stand."

He makes a point of attending every home game - but not church every Sunday. "I've got to be very careful what I say here, because other Christians are my brothers and sisters. I didn't go last Sunday to our local, but I think maybe the Sunday before. It's a wonderful little church, full of wonderfully spirited, kind, elderly people who, bless them, would not know how to connect with some of the people I'm trying to connect with. The church warden asked me, 'As you're the local missionary, will we be seeing some young people coming?' and I said, 'The short answer is no. At least, it's not my objective.' "

He goes on: "If Jesus spent his time with people who the religious authorities kicked out as unclean, maybe there's a challenge there. I once joined a scooter club, full of rightwing skinheads with a lot of beliefs entirely abhorrent to me. One guy, who named me 'Vic', is well over six and a half foot tall, and dresses completely in black combats and braces. He's a frightening guy who, if I met him in the street, I'd run a mile from. But I can honestly say I feel love for them.

"If I want somebody in Telford to be blessed, it's not me," he says. "It's somebody else in Telford, please. Please use me to bless them. Sorry, that sounds very pious. But bollocks, God cares more about what you do for other people."

Guardian Unlimited | Weekend | John Hind tracks down people who go against the grain
Filed in: Christian, mission, spirituality, UK

Education for the pursuit of happiness

A few days ago I got my first reading list for teacher training, so my thoughts are being led towards the educational endeavour. One of the attractions to me of teaching Religious Education in the UK is that the syllabus generally includes not only introducing spiritual ideas and thinking critically about them, but also less specifically religious themes such as justice, peace, environment and perhaps even touching on themes like this. The article is arguing for the

need to teach happiness while at school, while individuals are still having their characters and habits formed. It is much harder to acquire good habits later in life. So in what will the lessons consist? These will not be lessons like history or physics, where it is primarily the intellect involved, and where the acquisition of knowledge is all important. This is about emotional learning and emotional intelligence, and is a far more reflective activity then traditional classes. Pupils will learn about how to form healthy and sustaining relationships. They will gain understanding about the goals they should want to set in life, which should be realistic and appropriate for their own talents and interests. The negative emotions which are an inevitable part of life will be explored: pupils will be able to learn more about what it is that causes them pain and unhappiness, how they might be able to avoid or minimise these emotions and how to deal with them when they do occur. So the essence is that pupils learn more about themselves, which will be information which they will be able to use for the rest of their lives.

In fact some of this is covered in state school in PSE [Personal and Social Education] in which pastoral tutors tend to be involved. Still, so much of that relates to things about life coaching and even pastoral work, it will be good to be involved in 'delivering' it.

The article has a handy guide to famous thinkers on the matter, and the summary on Augustine of Hippo says:

Happiness lies in the possession of an invulnerable good, which cannot be lost to ill fortune, according to St Augustine. The only good in the universe of such strength, in his view, is God. Therefore happiness lies in the "vision of" or "union with" God. This necessitates living a moral life.

I'd go along with that, it seems to come straight out of the sermon on the mount.

Independent Online Edition > News: Filed in: happiness, education, philosophy, religion, faith

Being a Christian makes you happier ...

We now have studies showing that religious allegiance on average will help you live longer, and now that you are more likely to feel yourself happier:

The study, commissioned by the Evangelical Alliance and Premier Radio, found that of those polled 75 per cent of church goers said they were happy with life compared to 54 per cent of people who never attend a service. When a parallel study was carried out with evangelical Christians the happiness percentage rose to over 80.

All of this prompts a question: what has atheism got to commend it? Indeed, if there is no God, why is it that acting as if there were is a survival plus? Add that question to the one about why it is easier to commend morality on the basis of a theistic world view than one which rules God out ...
Filed in: happiness, psychology, church, Christian, researchBlack UK Online - Black and minority ethnic News 24/7, Sport, Black and minority ethnic Dating, Music, Lifestyles, Jobs & Careers:

renew for freedom - MAY 2006 - renew your passport

After about 2008, renewing your passport is increasingly likely to get you onto the National Identity Register in the UK. This is a worrying development...

Once you are on the Register, you will never get off until it is abolished. But you'll be exposed to all the risks and dangers of the scheme immediately. The Home Office is building the most complex and intrusive ID control system in the world. It will certainly go wrong. Once you are on the Register — with or without a card — you will also be forced to keep all the details that are kept about you up to date (and sort out any government errors). Once you are on the Register you will face penalty charges for not telling the Home Office if you move house or if any other of your registered details change. Far from being 'foolish', renewing your passport to avoid all this is just plain common sense.

I've been waiting to see if there might be such an action and I'm pleased to recommend this campaign to you. I'm imagining, on the basis of what we are seeing and hearing at the moment about this, a situation where we have to produce 'voluntarily' an ID card for routine financial transactions and any government-related activity. All of which will be logged by a central database. This database will in turn become a potential commercial goldmine, even with aggregated and anonymised info.

Do we trust low paid NIR personnel to be immune from the temptations of bribery [and remember it could be your own details at risk]? Do we trust a government keen for extra spending but not extra taxes to resist selling some info, and then some more, and so on until it becomes relatively easy to work out more personal stuff?

Is the pope German?

Big brother will be watching you via database logs; welcome the surveillance state. Remember those phone calls from your credit card company whenever a few 'out of normal pattern' purchases take place? Well, similar 'out of pattern' logs in the database will be automatically passed on to the new National Crime Squad, MI5, the Special Branch ... Nothing to fear if you've done nothing wrong? Except the permanent record of the logging and the intrusive calls, and perhaps loads of time at inconvenient moments having to explain yourself to officious burocrats or suspicious crime investigation officers making you feel like a criminal. You know that's how it'll be. Admit it.

And to add weight to the concerns, get this:

David Blunkett ... once said: “No one should fear correct identification.” Those words always remind me of one the more distressing details of the Eichmann trial: how he told his executioner that the fate of those killed in the Holocaust was sealed by their answers to the 1939 census on religious background recorded on paper for a Hollerith machine, an early mechanical computer. Quite literally, their cards were marked.

Speaking of which, there are concerns about whether it really is possible for a UK government to get a project like this sorted out adequately. But then, if they get it wrong, the legislation provides the solution; mistakes would be our fault and we pay a 2000 quid fine: that should finance the fixes.

renew for freedom - MAY 2006 - renew your passport:

Statswatch: the lords prayer in aramaic

I have been fascinated to watch via site statistics which of my posts seem to be picked up and become regularly visited. And I discovered today that not only does my post on the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic get a lot of traffic, but that it has hit the top spot in a Yahoo search for "the lords prayer in aramaic" and number three in a similar Google search.
the lords prayer in aramaic - Yahoo! Search Results

Lord's prayer patterned Eucharist

I have been thinking about whether it is possible and desirable to produce a Communion service which echoes the shape of the Lord's Prayer. I had come up with a tentative shape to try to do this and was wondering whether it was worth working any more on it. Then, a few weeks back I happened to be investigating older eucharistic liturgies in search of ideas about the placement of the narrative of institution and looked over Cranmer's 1549 rite, and as I looked through it realised that it had a Lord's Prayer shape. Remarkable. It means that I have a kind of [probably unintended] precedent for working on this. One that lies in the reformation origins of Anglicanism as it began to be shaped in contradistinction to Roman practice.

Follow/click on the link under the title to see how the shape works out.

I hope to work on a more contemporary version in due course. I have a prayer book with a set of complines in the Lord's prayer pattern to complete first as well as a downloadable PDA version of that to sort out. However, I may see if I can do enough to include it in the PDA version.

abbeynous.schtuff.com - Eucharist in the Lord's prayer pattern
Filed in: Lord's_prayer, communion, eucharist, praying_the_pattern

Cut N Spray good friday

Really nice piece of work by a cut'n'spray artist.
Cut N Spray � Maya’s good friday

Alcohol and depression

One of the things that we have tried to get over to our kids is alcohol awareness. In the UK children from 5 years may drink alcohol legally in private [all the laws after that age restrict public consumption of alcohol]. We have taken the view that other cultures seem to have reasonably healthy ways of relating to alcohol where they allow children to be introduced to drinking in a family setting. So we have allowed them to try it and at the same time have talked about the effects of drinking it and why we don't drink excessively, and have highlighted the negative effects short-term and long-term of excessive drinking. One of the effects derives from the fact that alcohol is a depressant, and so we have highlighted the bad idea it is to use alcohol to deal with the effects of depression. Interesting to find, then, this report.

"Drinking alcohol is a very common and accepted way of coping - our culture allows us to use alcohol for 'medicinal purposes' or 'dutch courage' from an early age. But using alcohol to deal with anxiety and depression doesn't work as alcohol can weaken the neurotransmitters that the brain needs to reduce anxiety and depressive thoughts. This is why lots of people feel low when they have a hangover."

I would add the maudlin 'crying over your beer' thing which doesn't even wait for the hangover. The point about a depressant is that it diminishes the ability of the brain to deal with things, starting with the 'higher' functions and working down. So the initial 'good buzz' is about disinhibition, but after that it can get seriously bad; moral restraints flag leading to promiscuity and aggression not being adequately controlled, the chemicals that keep us cheerier flag and the sad, insecure, low-self-esteem character that we all have gets to come out to 'play' too ...

Me? I like a glass or two of wine, but I hate not being in control of my body and I hate to see the disinhibitions in others and would not like to be in that position.

Of course, it all becomes reflexive too. People 'know' certain things about the effects of alcohol, and are suggestible too, so we play social games with it too. Studies have shown that a group of people who are told they are drinking alcohol, but aren't, will tend to act as if they are becoming drunk [the placebo effect, reinforced by suggestion, I would warrant]. Some people seem to drink precisely because they believe that drunkenness will give them the excuse to do things they would not otherwise and to blame it on the alcohol or even to feign [and I suspect in the majority of cases it is feigned - I suspect that memory loss is an effect for alcoholics over a long period] loss of memory to escape the consequences of their actions.

The only way out of this rats' nest is to continue to disapprove of drunkenness, not to connive in its social acceptability or laugh and make light of its effects. We need the kind of revolution in attitudes that has gone on with smoking to accrue to alcohol too.

It may be worth noting too that recent studies show that alcohol addiction has a genetic component in at least some people and families.

Me, I like a drink, but ...
SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Health | Britons turn to alcohol to mask depression:
Filed in: health, depression, alcohol, UK

Don't look at Italy or Israel for PR

Israel and Italy are always used, especially by First-Past-the-Post advocates and lazy journalists, to tarnish the case for electoral reform. Both countries employ systems that are at the furthest extremes of proportional representation and that none of us, even the most ardent reformer, would ever dream of recommending for the UK.

Here's a useful article as to why they aren't and what the issues really are for the UK.
Make My Vote Count

Tories' green instincts?

Cameron has made a connection between traditional Tory concerns and the environment.

The "simple instinct" to protect and enhance the world has been at the heart of Conservatism for generations, Mr Cameron insisted today. "It's an issue that I've put at the top of the political agenda over the past few months, one that I care deeply about, from climate change to cleaner streets, from cutting waste to cutting noise, pollution - environmental issues are all about improving our quality of life."

The question is whether he can make it stick, since the Tory's have been more known for the 'simple instinct' to be expressed as nimbyism and little Englander-ness than in corporate action. In fact, I rather suspect that it is Tories who are doing most of the opposing of wind power facilities and are buying most of the 4x4 off-roaders. I believe Cameron's commitment -after all he cycles to work- but I really do not think the Tory party is behind him.
Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Cameron stresses Tories' green instincts:

Death, famine, drought: cost of 3C global rise in temperature

We need to take this in both to understand how urgent things are and also to realise that we are not talking about more of the same only a bit warmer. Some people seem to think that it'd be nice to have a warmer climate. Unfortunately, the collateral effects are rather serious as this article helps us to understand. What we should also realise is that even a smaller effect will have some of these consequences and that the results politically over the next 50 years is that we should be preparing for population movements, disruptions of food supplies, tensions over basic resources like water, as Christians the question is do we prepare to be part of the solution to a threatened new dark ages and the potential 'mongol/hun/vandal invasions' or are we going to hide our heads in the increasingly warm sand?

I can't help wondering, either, whether the kind of legislation that western Anglo-saxon governments seem to be keen on passing -ostensibly to fight terrorism- is actually being framed more with handling the kinds of difficulties that are just beginning to be noticed and which will surely grow. I can't believe that there are not government think-tanks testing out these scenarios and thinking about what would be needed to meet them. Clearly, they think that more repression is our only hope; can we not develop other models which rely on Christian principles other than Augustinian/Constantinian?

To our bretheren who believe that this is all about the signs of the end I say: the church has loads of t-shirts for this already and we're still waiting. We all wish that this may not happen, but such wishes may not be fulfilled even if we persuade ourselves as Christians have done in former ages that they are right and think we have interpreted scripture rightly. And if you are wrong, you will have contributed to darkening the ages that follow ours; the verdict of history on you would not honour our Lord. In any case, if, when He comes, Jesus expects us to be doing what we are called to do and if His coming is to surprise us all [and this is the unambiguous message of the gospels on the matter], then what should you/we be doing but acting in the light of what we know and working for the common good and to lay foundations for the spread of the gospel? All of these considerations point to acting to help damp down climate change.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Death, famine, drought: cost of 3C global rise in temperature

Filed in: global_warming, environment, science, climate_change, effects, politics

Britain's drift to "Fabio-Fascism"

One of the commentators on this article shows that what we are facing now has a long history and that we are back on a disturbing trend interupted by WW2 and the cold war:

In the 1930s E.M. Forster wrote: “We are menaced by something much more insidious [than Fascism or Communism] – by what I might call ‘Fabio-Fascism’, by the dictator-spirit working quietly away behind the facade of constitutional forms….Fabio-Fascism is what I am afraid of, for it is the traditional method by which liberty has been attacked in England”. While the Blair brigade is bossy but probably basically benign, the same may not be true of its successor governments in twenty, or even ten, years’ time. As Forster said, “As soon as people have power they go crooked and sometimes dotty as well, because the possession of power lifts them into a region where normal honesty never pays.”

It's that last line with its twist on Lord Acton's dictum ["All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely"]that is truly worrying.
It's worth reading also John Pilger's New Statesman article on the topic. If you have the stomach for it; I'm feeling slightly queasy about it all.

Like the constitution-hijacking bill now reaching its final stages, and the criminalising of peaceful protest, ID cards are designed to control the lives of ordinary citizens (as well as enrich the new Labour-favoured companies that will build the computer systems). A small, determined and profoundly undemocratic group is killing freedom in Britain, just as it has killed literally in Iraq. That is the news. "The kaleidoscope has been shaken," said Blair at the 2001 Labour party conference. "The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us reorder this world around us."

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Blair's inner circle and its ferocious grab for power
Filed in: UK, government, reform, liberties

Nuclear power is not energy solution, say MPs

The findings of the parliamentary environmental audit committee raise concerns over the risk of terrorist attacks, but also focus on the full costs of nuclear generation, such as the disposal of waste and decommissioning. Its report on nuclear power, renewables and climate change questions whether new plants would cut carbon emissions as dramatically as promised and suggests they could crowd out other energy sources such as windpower

Let's hope this report carries enough weight and support to kill nuclear power in the UK.
Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Nuclear power is not energy solution, say MPs:
Filed in: energy, UK, policy, government, nuclear, renewables

This is how it ends ... not with a bang,

... but with a whimper. The Blair administration, elected as much because of disenchantment with a Tory government that had clearly begun to rule for the sake of the gravy train, has fallen prey to the same temptations of power and wealth.

Number 10's 'citations' explaining the case for putting Sir David Garrard and Barry Townsley in the House of Lords 'prominently' featured their role in helping these inner city schools. Downing Street sources said the Prime Minister wanted their political support in the Lords for the controversial policy.

One has to wonder whether the rather tyranically-potentiated legislation that they are attempting to put on the books is actually a means to try to keep the gravy train on the rails for them.
The Observer | Politics | No 10 admits link between school donors and peerages:

This is how it ends ... not with a bang,

... but with a whimper. The Blair administration, elected as much because of disenchantment with a Tory government that had clearly begun to rule for the sake of the gravy train, has fallen prey to the same temptations of power and wealth.

Number 10's 'citations' explaining the case for putting Sir David Garrard and Barry Townsley in the House of Lords 'prominently' featured their role in helping these inner city schools. Downing Street sources said the Prime Minister wanted their political support in the Lords for the controversial policy.

One has to wonder whether the rather tyranically-potentiated legislation that they are attempting to put on the books is actually a means to try to keep the gravy train on the rails for them.
The Observer | Politics | No 10 admits link between school donors and peerages:

Secularity and fundamentalism

When I first read the following, I thought it was saying something else.

Fundamentalism's strength as an opponent is the certainty of its convictions.
The defenders of the secular state, believers and non-believers, can only hope to disarm it by finding a language that allows for doubt without compromising its own familiar principles - its faith in a rationally ordered society, a respect for science, for evidence-based knowledge, for non-religious education, and tolerance of religion supported by laws protecting individual rights.

I thought that what was recommended was that a language that allowed for identification of important faith-issues which also left room for people to honour them without necessarily interpreting them illiberally. I guess that's actually been going on for ages. In fact. But it does rumind us that we need to maintain wide roads between fundamentalisms and their 'host' faith-community so that on reflection people can move across to less aggressive and closed expressions of faith without feeling that it is some kind of second conversion but rather it has positive continuities with what has gone before in their lives. This is a really hard thing to do, and it requires that we can see and honour the goods of a fundamentalist position while critiquing it with, as far as possible, the resources of its own positions. It also requires a positive regard [which we might call respect, even love] and an unwavering commitment to the welfare of those who are involved in fundamentalism. The 'demonising' of opponents is to fall prey to the same dynamics as we are seeking to break others out from.

So the 'doubt' is presumably about how the principles of respect, equality, and freedom are to be exercised. I think that this amounts to preferring 'soft' secularism over 'hard'. This is the effect, I think, of "a secular society is not one with no religion, but one where all are free". I have come across versions of secularism where a hard attitude prevails; that is where, in effect religion is not really recognised or allowed in the public realm. 'Soft' secularism recognises that 'public space actors' bring with them, among other things, a religious or philosophical identity and makes room for it without allowing it to be unfairly imposed on others. It's messier and means constant negotiation and the risk of misunderstanding, but that's better than building a permanent resentment among those for whom religious concerns are precisely the issue in public life.
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Fight the good fight:
Filed in: religion, fundamentalism, secularity, society

A point of fact?

An interesting article on the rise of fundamentalism. But I was puzzled by this bit implicating Christian fundamentalism in terrorist activity.

Christian fundamentalism brought violence to the United States almost a decade before 9/11. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who killed 168 people in 1995, was acting in revenge for the federal authorities' attack on the Waco Branch Davidian sect two years earlier.

I'm not saying that Christian fundamentalisms don't have ideologies that justify violence. Some of them do. It's that I thought McVeigh's issue was political: he hated the way that federal government in the USA was conspiring to surpress liberties and the Waco episode seemed to be the epitome and final straw for him. I wasn't aware he was a fundy ...
Anyone got any further info on this?
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Fight the good fight:Filed in: fundamentalism, religion, culture, global

Move towards the light ...

Scientists have developed wafer-thin sheets that fill a room with natural light at the flick of a switch, according to research published today.The sheets are designed to be transparent but radiate brilliant white light when hooked up to an electricity supply. Because they do not warm up like traditional bulbs they waste far less energy

If they really can be produced easily and a way found to easily modify them to work with existing wiring plans and fittings, these could be a lot of fun. The artist in me is already licking his lips, though some of the ideas are kitsch. I can think of some potentially very nice worship ideas with light panels ... hmmm ... would depend on just how they look but the not being hot thing is a definite plus.

Just one issue remains, how will this affect interior design, not least of public buildings, not least of churches...

Guardian Unlimited | Science | Bright idea could put old-fashioned light bulbs in the shade:
Filed in: energy, efficiency, lighting, altworship

old-fashioned light bulbs to become obselete

Scientists have developed wafer-thin sheets that fill a room with natural light at the flick of a switch, according to research published today. The sheets are designed to be transparent but radiate brilliant white light when hooked up to an electricity supply. Because they do not warm up like traditional bulbs they waste far less energy

Which is good news. It will obviously take a while for them to come into the fullness of their potential, and I hope that they develop ways to make it easy for us to modify existing light fittings to use them [that would be the killer app] ...
Guardian Unlimited | Science | Bright idea could put old-fashioned light bulbs in the shade:
Filed in: energy, efficiency, lighting

Disease Mongering

It's a new term to me: "disease mongering". But I have to say I keep bumping into the core idea as I think and read about the role of corporations in our lives. The problem is that pharmaceutical companies, like any corporation, need to shift product to continue. However, under the current legislative frameworks, they are really only and ultimately responsible to their shareholders to make a profit and as big a one as they can get away with. So in comes the dubious practices of persuading people that these chemicals are needed, whether the people are medics or us directly over the counter. I tend to feel that the alternative medicine movements have a point where they chastise western medicine for going down the route of fixing problems rather than promoting health and wholeness. The problem with pharma is the structural reflex of that written into a global capitalist system.

So can it be done differently? That's a good question. I suspect the campaign for reining in corporations by reviewing the way that their charters work in respect of widening their responsibilities may be a start. However, the bigger issue is how to devise a structure that is efficient and self regulating which will produce and research the production of drugs etc for the common good rather than for private profit in a way that makes sure that there are incentives to develop and yet not to disease monger. And I'm suffering a lack of imagination at this point. So we are left with reform of charters pro-tem.

I'm very open to having some further thoughts and links on this...
PLoS Medicine: Disease Mongering Collection
Filed in: health, wholeness, disease, pharma, corporations

Creationism of a different stripe

Oh what fun!
Turns out that it is more than just the fundy Christians who are watching developments with regard to teaching evolution and intelligent design in USAmerican schools. I was scratching my head: who on earth might be interested in it? Muslims? -I remember after the overthrow of the Shah, Iranian students at the university I attended were interested in the Christian Union bookstall, particularly the creationist pamphlets that were all the rage in some quarters of the CU. But no, the surprise is that it is Hundus, particularly the Hare Krishna devotees. Here's why:

Vedic creationists ... deny that different species of living beings, including humans, have evolved, or risen up, from simpler organisms, as Darwin claims. Instead, they claim that all species, including humans, have “devolved,” or come down from, a highly evolved, super-intelligent being, which is pure consciousness itself. Different species of plants and animals are simply material forms adopted by consciousness, Atman, as it transmigrates in endless cycles of births and rebirths over billions and billions of years. Spiritual growth is the driving force of evolution: higher species emerge when Atman trapped in all matter takes on a higher (more “subtle” and sattvic) life-form as a result of good karma, and lower species result when Atman “forgets” its purity and indulges in “gross desires.”

So there you have it. I guess since there is a certain circularity in dating rocks by fossils and then fossils by rocks then they can get some purchase on reinterpreting the fossil record in an analogous way to Christian fundies ...
Metanexus Institute:
Filed in: religion, Vedas, Hindu, Krishna, creation, science, USA

Act now to stop more incineration

UK resi's can use this site to encourage the government via their consultation on waste disposal to move away from incineration which requires fossil fuels and produces greenhouse gases. My tip is to have a go at tweaking the wording so that it doesn't look too manufactured and so be ignored.
Here's my tweak:
Dear Sir / Madam,

Why is the Government planning to force through a large increase in incineration capacity in England? In view of manifesto and treaty commitments to reduce global warming gas emissions, I think that the government should focus instead on increasing recycling and composting and on waste prevention measures.

So, I would like to see the following actions:

- A commitment to high recycling and composting targets for household waste, aiming for 75% by 2015. (This *is* possible: Belgian Flanders is already recycling 71 per cent of its household waste).

- Let local councils charge households for the amount of rubbish produced (after recycling is taken out). Rather than everyone paying the same through council tax, those who recycle and reduce waste production will pay less than those who don't.

- Tax incineration to encourage councils to maximise recycling, which is a more effective way of tackling climate change.

- Compulsory targets for supermarkets and other corporate bodies for reducing the amount of waste they produce, particularly waste which cannot be recycled or composted.

Please accept this email as a response to the consultation on England's Waste Strategy.


Yours sincerely,
...
Friends of the Earth: Campaigns: Waste: Press for change: Act now to stop more incineration

The silver screen and outreach: who's exploiting whom?

We should reflect on what happened with films like The Passion and Narnia. Loads of churches invested money and time in using them ostensibly as outreach. But, is that what happened? Not according to Barna's research. In fact, reading this article, I suspect that the churches have collectively fallend for the next phase of the film industry's exploitation of religion for marketting. The first phase was to leak hints of allegedly blasphemous or moral panic-inducing scripts and rely on 'righteous' indignation to produce free advertising [all publicity is good publicity, even -perhaps especially- protests and pickets]. But lately that tactic has not been so good. Perhaps Christians have collectively realised that high profile protest just encourages them by adding money to the project whereas letting bad films sink into obscurity achieves their aims more effectively in the longer term.
So what's a film company to do? Here's a clue:

Paul Lauer, president of Motive Marketing, says his company's primary mission isn't marketing movies, but rather “providing congregations with tools to further their goals.” Given that The Passion and Narnia have collectively earned nearly one billion dollars, while the church’s goal hasn’t measurably advanced at all, maybe Mr. Lauer needs to reassess his company’s mission.

Yep: if you can't offend them into boosting your sales, tell them it'll help them grow their membership and then let them do the work of driving people into cinema seats. Cheap ready made sales staff using their own money to sell your tickets. A marketting plan to die for!

Am I truly such a cynic now? No, don't answer that, I might find the answer hard to deal with!

Leadership Blog: Out of Ur: The Passion Reloaded: is the silver screen really an outreach silver bullet?:
Filed in: Christian, mission, evangelism, film, culture

Reciprocity in conversion [2]

A useful reference from a BF letter from a convert from Islam to Christianity about conversion in Islam. I think he did his doctorate on this.
I'm not qualified to comment on whether this is a reasonable take on sharia, but it is something that raises questions that non-Muslims need to hear answers to. If this understanding of what sharia says is not correct, how is it not correct, and what principles of interpretation are used to arrive at more humane positions. In other words, what evidence is there that the humane approaches are principled and not merely expedient? I've found Muslims very little inclined to explain the hermeneutics of a humane and equal approach on this matter and one or two others. I so want there to be a principled and humane version of Islam when it comes to things like this, but what we tend to find is inconsistent and prone to being re-hijacked by the less humane end of Islamic polity.
I have cut a few bits of this article.

CONVERTS FROM ISLAM - FREE TO CHOOSE?
... a number of Muslims in
the West have denied the existence of the classic Islamic teaching on
apostasy. For example, London-based Mufti Abdul Barkatullah said that the
Shafi’i school of Islamic law eschews the death penalty for apostasy. This
assertion is so easily refuted from the Shafi’i texts that one can only
think the mufti assumes that no non-Muslim would ever bother to check his
words.

The classical Shafi‘i manual of law, "‘Umdat al-Salik" [The Reliance of the
Traveller] by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (died 1368) is unambiguous on this
point. I quote from an English translation by Nuh Ha Mim Keller, published
in the USA in 1997:

"8.1 When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily
apostatises from Islam, he deserves to be killed.
8.2 In such a case, it is obligatory for the caliph to ask him to repent
and return to Islam. If he does, it is accepted from him, but if he
refuses, he is immediately killed."

Anwar Ahmad Qadri, a Pakistani lawyer, published "A Sunni Shafi‘i Law Code"
in Pakistan in 1984. This work is a translation of "Mukhtasar fil Risalah"
by the classical Shafi‘i jurist Abu Shuja al-Isfahani (died 1106), and
states, including footnotes:

"Art. 113 Rules for Apostates. It is obligatory to ask the person
apostatising from the religion of Islam, or on irtidad, (1) to offer taubah
three times; then it is good if he did it, otherwise, he shall be killed
(2); then, he will neither be given a bath, nor any funeral prayer, and so
also, he will not be buried in the graveyard of Muslims.
¹ May be a male or a female, as he or she refuses to accept Allah, or
falsifies any of the Prophets or holds as legal the things held haram by
consensus or ijma‘.
² If a free man, the imam will kill him but not by burning; if anyone kills
him except the imam, he will be punished by ta‘zir; if the apostate is a
slave, the master will kill him."

...

Yusuf’s ... repeats the familiar adage that the Qur’an says that
“there is no compulsion in religion” and suggests that everyone is free to
choose their own faith. The quote is accurate (from sura 2, verse 256) but
the interpretation is a special one for Westerners. The normal Muslim
interpretation of this verse is that Muslims will not be forced to fulfil
all their religious duties, it is up to them whether they do so or not.
This verse has nothing to say about freedom of conscience. In any case, it
is a verse that was “revealed” relatively early to Muhammad and therefore
many Muslims would consider that it has been abrogated [cancelled] by less
tolerant-sounding verses which were revealed to Muhammad in later years.

... He states that Islam’s death
sentence for apostasy is actually a death sentence for treason because any
Muslim who left their faith and yet wanted to remain in the Islamic
city-state of early Islam was “effectively committing treason”. But why
should it be considered treasonable to stay in one’s homeland after
changing one’s religion? Yusuf’s argument is nothing but a re-statement of
the classical Islamic position that a convert from Islam is by definition a
traitor. He does not require any evidence of treacherous activity against
the Islamic state; simply to have left Islam without going into
self-imposed exile is treachery enough.

Yusuf attempts to support his case by a further selection of examples. He
says that “it isn’t the practice in the overwhelming majority of Muslim
countries to kill people who leave Islam.” I thank God this is true, with
only five modern states to my knowledge including the death sentence for
apostasy in their legislation (possibly plus Afghanistan whose legal
position remains unknown following Abdul Rahman’s release) and none of them
putting it into practice very often. Even taking into account murders by
family and community, and illegal assassinations by the security forces,
the vast majority of Muslim converts to Christianity today do not lose
their lives. But why should there be a death penalty even in
theory?

Yusuf cites the Swiss Muslim Tarik Ramadan as arguing against capital
punishment in Muslim countries because the corrupt police and judiciaries
“will make sharia an instrument of injustice”. In other words, it is not
that shari‘a is unjust but that bribe-taking officials might not apply it
impartially. This is not an argument against the rightness of the death
sentence for apostasy, but a counsel of despair from one who thinks
corruption can never be rooted out.

...

Yusuf’s crowning argument concerns the high rate of illiteracy in
Afghanistan, which he says accounts for their ignorance of Islamic law.
Again he is determined to disbelieve in the existence of the abundance of
Islamic texts which endorse the death sentence for apostasy.

In fact it is Irfan Yusuf’s readers who are likely to be ignorant of
Islamic law, not the Afghan people. If he were not so certain of the
ignorance of most New Zealanders, indeed of most Westerners, he surely
would not have dared to write such an article.

It is better for Muslims to be completely honest about their faith. The
late Dr Zaki Badawi, who was president of the Muslim College in London,
wrote a paper on “Freedom of Religion in Islam” tracing the history of the
development of the apostasy law. He stated that “earlier jurists, with a
few exceptions, supported the death penalty for the apostate and this
remains the case to the present day”. Muslims can claim that the death
sentence for apostasy was never intended by their founder (and this may
well be true), but to claim that it was not taught by his followers as a
basic doctrine for the next fourteen centuries is ludicrous.

It is only when Muslims have admitted the true situation that there is the
possibility of change. A number of scholars of Sunni Islam’s leading
Al-Azhar University in Cairo have in recent decades suggested that the
apostasy law should be abandoned and genuine religious freedom allowed. We
non-Muslims must do all we can to encourage this move within Islam. It was
at Al-Azhar on 21st March that the Prince of Wales gave an outstanding
speech urging mutual respect between the faiths, indicating in particular
the need for reciprocity of treatment of each other’s minorities.

Muslims are rightly permitted to share their faith freely in the West and
to win converts who rightly suffer no penalty. But this religious freedom
must be reciprocated. Afghanistan is far from being the only Muslim
country which has signed up to international agreements guaranteeing
freedom of religion (such as Article 18 of the United Nations Universal
Declaration of Human Rights) and has also asserted the supremacy of shari‘a
(complete with apostasy law), thus creating a serious ambiguity over issues
such as freedom of conscience.

Al-Azhar has begun to grapple with the subject of religious freedom in
Islam. What can be done to help them with this ground-breaking task, which
is sure to face tremendous opposition from certain sections of the Muslim
community? Could the Prince of Wales, Jack Straw and the Archbishop of
Canterbury jointly urge Al-Azhar to issue a fatwa condemning the execution
of apostates? Could the Lambeth-Al-Azhar initiative issue a joint
statement ? Now is the time to act, while the example of Abdul Rahman, who
was willing to die for his faith, is fresh in our minds. For although he
may now be safe in exile, the plight of other converts is, if anything,
even more acute as Muslim governments may decide it is better to let them
be quietly murdered than for them to become an international cause.

Dr Patrick Sookhdeo
International Director of Barnabas Fund

A shortened version of this article was published in the Church of England
Newspaper, UK (April 7, 2006)

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