Barefoot in the wilderness
in search of understanding

Slinkies

pax et bonum

Another reason to wait a few months

The Register is reporting that Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows Vista, suffers from a bug that causes many machines to stall while deleting, copying and moving files. No patch is available yet and, in the meantime, many users are finding that their shiny new PCs are working far more slowly than they used to.

pax et bonum

Online documents

Just2easy is another of those online word processors, but it’s a bit different. It’s free for individuals, but it’s specifically designed for schools. Based on the Textease program, it’s got lots of very good and easy to use features. Compared with other similar web services (like Google Documents), it’s fast and much easier to create poster-style documents, thanks to the nice way it lets you click anywhere on the page and just start writing. It handles photos and drawings very nicely, too. Well worth checking out!

pax et bonum

The Simpsons Movie

So maybe you knew this was coming but, what can I say? The Simpsons Movie is on its way. (Check out Trailer 3.)

pax et bonum

How many editors...?

Nancy at Away With Words has posted a linkfest, including this gem. I include it here in homage to my own occupation – to me, at least, it’s hilarious!

Q: How many editors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: I can’t tell whether you mean “change a lightbulb” or “have sex in a lightbulb.” Can we reword it to remove ambiguity?

pax et bonum

Is Wikipedia an encyclopaedia?

The Register has in interesting article discussing whether Wikipedia can really be described as an encyclopedia. The point isn’t whether it’s accurate or complete. (Nothing is totally accurate or complete.) No, the issue is the basic nature of the project. Because it generates its own references for the “facts” it includes, it cannot be suitable as a resource for serious research – the political infighting behind the articles and the potentially circular nature of its references mean that chasing down these facts becomes more trouble than it’s worth.

Wikipedia remains excellent as a casual source for information, but is it up to the job of being a serious encyclopedia?

pax et bonum

Flowers of shame

A new report from charity War on Want highlights the conditions under which most flowers sold in the UK are produced. Ekklesia says:

Flowers handed to mothers this Sunday will come from workers in developing countries who have risked their health for unsafe, insecure jobs supplying UK supermarkets, a new report suggests.
‘Growing Pains’ by anti-poverty charity War on Want investigates the human cost of cut flowers in British supermarkets, and calls on consumers to buy fair-trade flowers…
Flowers are likely to be the most popular Mother’s Day gift with £225m lavished on seven million bunches.
Although shoppers are increasingly aware of the environmental damage caused by pesticides and air miles, the report said they were “largely unaware” of the human price paid for their flowers by workers in poor countries.
A study of 8,000 flower workers in Bogota in 2002 found they had been exposed to 127 different pesticides, one fifth banned in the US for their toxicity.
Colombian flower workers – 65 per cent of whom are women – are being paid 50p an hour. In Kenya, the wage is £23 a month. Overtime is “compulsory” and workers have to put in longer hours in the run-up to celebrations such as Mother’s Day. Sexual harassment is “widespread”.

pax et bonum

Graph paper generator

If you’ve ever found yourself in need of graph paper, this is an excellent resource. It will create a PDF of graph paper to your precise requirements for you to download and print, and it does far more than simple graph paper – log grids, hexagonal grids, triangular, Moorish, dotted, polar, music notation and more.

pax et bonum

Spending the budget

The Register has an amusing take on why global warming will never be averted – companies have to spend their heating and lighting budgets.

At least, I think it was amusing. Either that or appalling…

pax et bonum

Jamelia eats Marmite

Yes, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can now watch famous R&B singer Jamelia taste Marmite for the first time! Plus, hear her views on Brillo pads, TCP and more. Just go to Guardian Unlimited Music and see!

(Anne is responsible for finding this one!)

pax et bonum

Kill the cliché

Nancy at Away With Words has a nice article listing clichés that people misunderstand and misuse. If there’s one thing worse than a cliché, it’s a cliché that’s being used wrongly!

(Thanks to Maggi for the link.)

pax et bonum

BNP and anti-abortionists

Ekklesia reports that the British National Party (our most right-wing party, which espouses policies like “repatriating” black people) is still pushing its campaign to be seen as supporting “white Christian Britain”. Now, it has started to target anti-abortion groups in order to attract issues-based votes, especially the Catholic vote – presumably, on the assumption that other issues (like racism) will be de-emphasised. Last week, it has extensive talks with the leadership of the Life League, and anti-abortion lobby group. I think that it behoves everyone, particularly those involved in single-issue pressure groups, not to allow the rightness of one issue to over-ride the wrongness of another. In other words, don’t vote for racists just because they oppose abortion.

pax et bonum

Antivirus software

Everyone needs antivirus software (yes, even those of us not running Windows – low risk isn’t the same as no risk) but not all antivirus products are created equal. In recent tests, reports The Register, Microsoft’s new OneCare product came last out of 17 packages tested, allowing 17.6% of the half a million test viruses through. The top package was G Data Security’s AntiVirusKit, which only let 0.45% through. The products by F-Secure, Kaspersky Labs, Avira and AEC all scored “Advanced+” in the tests. Norton did slightly less well with “Advanced” (missing 3.2% of threats) and McAfee only scored a “Standard” rating (missing 8.4%). Time to change antivirus package, perhaps?

pax et bonum

Passport hack demonstrated again

The Daily Mail has demonstrated that the “proof of concept” hack of the new “secure” British passports, with their embedded chips, works in the wild. And with worrying consequences.

A shocking security gap allows the personal details and photograph in any electronic passport to be copied from the outside of the envelope in which it is delivered to homes.
The passport holder is none the wiser when it arrives because the white envelope has not been tampered with or opened.
Using a simple gadget built from parts bought on the Internet, it took the Mail less than four hours to copy the details from one passport.

(click for more)

Total lunar eclipse

The Register shares the news that the UK will get a lunar eclipse this weekend – starting at about 8pm on Saturday, with totality before 11pm.

pax et bonum

A guilty conscience?

Steve at On Earth as in Heaven posts some thoughts about why so much evangelism focuses on making us feel guilty (or, at least, on our being guilty) rather than on what the Gospel tells us that we will become.

One of the interesting things to come out of the ‘beyond the fringe’ research was that peoples personal aspirations, not surprisingly, where for happiness, family, relationships and success. However more surprisingly people on the whole didn’t chose those who had achieved this as those hey admired, rather they chose, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and yes Jesus. Might they secretly wish they could be like that too? Might the gospel that frees us from sin and death be the gospel that says, actually you can be like Jesus?

pax et bonum

From the mind of Maggi

Maggi Dawn has a couple of posts this week that struck me. The first, a quotation from the recent winner of the Templeton Prize for ‘Progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities’, Charles Taylor, includes the following analysis of the well-known aphorism “there are good people who do good things and bad people who do bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”

On one level, it is astonishing that anyone who lived through a good part of the 20th Century could say something like this. What are we to make of those noble, well-intentioned Bolsheviks, Marxist materialist atheists to a man (and occasional woman), who ended up building one of the most oppressive and murderous brace of regimes in human history? When people quote this phrase to me, or some equivalent, and I enter this objection, they often reply, “but Communism was a religion,” a reply which shifts the goal-posts and upsets the argument…
any set of beliefs which can induce decent people, who would never kill for personal gain, to murder for the cause, is being defined as “religion.” “Religion” is being defined as the murderously irrational.
Pretty sloppy thinking. But it is also crippling. What the speaker is really expressing is something like this: the terrible violence of the 20th Century has nothing to do with right-thinking, rational, enlightened people like me.

Arrogance can creep up disturbingly easily when discussing moral matters. Which leads neatly into this second quotation, from Maggi herself wondering why she (as so many of us) ends up writing a lot more than she means to when talking about deep issues.

The great 20th century protestant theologian, Karl Barth, was far more verbose and abstract than I shall ever be, and I take heart from him when I think I’m getting too involved in complexities of words and thought. But I take heart even more from this little anecdote. Someone once asked Barth whether he could sum up his whole theology in just a few words. Barth paused for a moment, and then replied, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” When words get too much, I always remember that.

pax et bonum

Lest we forget

James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, was speaking at an event commemmorating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the UK, when he strayed away from what he might have been expected to say. Far from remembering the undoubted part Christians played in abolishing slavery, he reminded those present of the part the Church played in maintaining it.

“The fact that William Wilberforce became a committed Christian and championed the passing through Parliament of the Bill to abolish the Slave Trade could be, and indeed has been, taken by Christians to be both evidence and example of how Christianity inspires radical social action and transformation. Although that is an attractive thesis and has within it seeds of truth, the fuller picture is much more complicated.
“The Establishment countenanced both slavery and the trade, fearing that abolition would threaten the British Empire with economic ruin. The Bishops, with the notable exception of the Bishop of Chester, Reilly Porteus, who later went on to become ‘Bishop of London’ sided with the Establishment.”

(From Ekklesia.)

(Maggi also has some thoughts on the issue.)

pax et bonum

Graveyard in Parliament Square

Marking the fourth anniversary of the invasion, Christians planted 186 crosses, each bearing the name of an Iraqi killed by US or UK forces.
Each cross represented a thousand people killed since the invasion, said campaigners…
According to a survey published in the Lancet last October, at least 186,000 Iraqis have been killed by coalition forces in Iraq since the beginning of the 2003 invasion – 31% of all violent deaths in Iraq up to June 2006.
A BBC/ICM survey of more than 1,000 people, released yesterday (Tuesday) suggested that the Iraq war now has support from less than a third of the UK population.

(From Ekklesia.)

pax et bonum

Arms or food?

Ekklesia reports the launch of the Blow the Whistle campaign – an attempt to get Governments to check progress now that we’re half way to the target date for the Millennium Development Goals to halve world poverty by 2015. But some of the British MPs (from the organisation Christians in Parliament) got a shock when reminded of the UK Government’s recent decision to buy a new set of nuclear weapons:

“The billions of pounds spent on arms could be spent alleviating world poverty” World Vision chief executive Charles Badenoch said. “Then we would not only have a more just world, but a more secure world.”

pax et bonum

Disestablishment?

Ruth Gledhill writes about comments by the previous archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey. He says that, if the House of Lords (the second of the two houses of the British Parliament) is reformed so as to eliminate the places of the bishop, the Church of England should push hard for disestablishment. Now, this is seeming like a probable outcome (the Commons voted for the 100% elected option) even though many oppose it, including the Lords – not merely for selfish reasons or through love of anachronism but because it really does work and has done an excellent job of holding the elected politicians to account. And if the bishops do lose their seats, it places the CofE in an unequal yoke. The appointment of bishops is approved by the Prime Minister on behalf of the monarch, and Parliament can pass laws that control the CofE. So how can the CofE accept such governance when it no longer has any official role in the Parliament? We may finally see the day when the Church of England becomes free, although it may come at a high price.

pax et bonum

Easy salvation?

Graham at Leaving Munster reminds us that salvation isn’t just a matter of praying the “sinner’s prayer”. No approach to evangelism can be correct whose aim is simply getting people to pray a prayer. The prayer is a good start, a small first step – no more than that.

How is it that so many people miss the implications of the question of the crowds, in Acts 2? When they ask, “What must we do to be saved?”, Peter doesn’t say, “Do? What must you do? Goodness, you don’t do anything. You just pray a quick prayer and receive.” Instead, he tells them what to do: change the direction of your life, expressing this through the Jewish practice of a ceremony to wash away your sins and implant your in the community, and you will receive the gift of the Spirit that Jesus promised to all those disciples that he was sending out. This is true for yourselves, your children and even the Gentiles that God is calling.

Graham’s discussing an article from Christianity Today, which goes on to say:

Anyone can, and most Americans do, “believe” in Jesus rather than some alternative savior. Anyone can, and many Americans sometimes do, say a prayer asking Jesus to save them. But not many embark on a life fully devoted to the love of God, the love of neighbor, the moral practice of God’s will, and radical, costly discipleship.
If it comes down to a choice between our habitual, ingrained ways of talking about salvation and what Jesus himself said when asked the question, I know what I must choose.

pax et bonum

Eucharistic ignorance

Graham at Leaving Munster writes about his experience debating the Eucharist in a study group. This group consisted of Anglicans and Baptists, and these two groups have traditionally had very different understandings of what Communion is about. On the Baptist side, ideed, Graham says:

it is possible to reach a point where the only real thing being said about the Eucharist is that nothing happens!

He then goes on to note that:

One of the likeable aspects of the Anglican view…is their reluctance to go beyond the clear pronouncements of scripture. So, our Anglican pastor was happy saying that Christ was “somehow” present in the bread and wine but couldn’t – and wouldn’t – say more than that.

Shared ignorance is indeed sometimes better than shared certainty.

pax et bonum

Fundamentalists and atheists - best friends?

Writing for Ekklesia, Giles Fraser asks whether atheists in the Media aren’t doing precisely what the religious fundamentalists want.

Media atheists of the narrower kind are fast becoming the new best friends of fundamentalist Christians. For every time they write about religion they are doing very effective PR for a fundamentalist worldview. Many of the propositions that fundamentalists are keen to sell the public are oft-repeated corner-stones of the media atheist’s philosophy of religion.
Both partners in this unholy alliance agree that fundamentalist religion is ‘the real thing’ and that more reflective and socially progressive versions of faith are pale imitations, counterfeits even…
the more fundamentalists can set up the disagreements concerning religion in terms of a Manichean struggle between the forces of God and “atheistic secularists”, the more troops they can summon to the defence of intolerant versions of Christianity.

pax et bonum

The Gospel according to Archer?

You can’t make this stuff up – Jeffrey Archer (one-time UK politician, convicted fraudster, prolific and best-selling author) has written a book about God, a new Gospel, no less. Working with noted scholar Professor Francis J Moloney, Archer has penned The Gospel of Judas by Benjamin Iscariot. This work is being heartily supported by the Roman Catholic Church, and even Desmond Tutu is apparently recording an audio version. Yes, really!

pax et bonum

Sending out

Bigbulkyanglican reminds us that our focus in mission and worship should not be on ourselves, or on the Church, but on God and what God is doing.

To put it in anglo-catholic terms (which might resonance with Christians of other traditions)...the climax of the Eucharist is not the receipt of the communion elements of bread and wine but the sending out into the world which ends the Eucharist or Mass. Mass of course has the same root word as mission – so mass and mission share a common purpose rather than being in some uneasy tension.

pax et bonum

Innovation in the Church

Thomas Bushnell has an interesting reflection on how the New Testament church viewed radical innovations in its life (like the unheard-of and heretical inclusion of uncircumcised non-Jews in the church), and points out the contrast with how the church seems to deal with things these days. In particular, the contrast is between requiring theological justifications before any change can be countenanced and joyfully recognising the outpourings of God’s blessing on the previously excluded.

(Thanks to Father Tobias for the link.)

pax et bonum