Jack of Kent has an interesting post about St Luke’s Gospel. He says that the nativity story has been embellished and fabricated to the point where it is simply incorrect… other than the fact that Jesus was indeed born around 4 BC, somewhere in what is now modern Palestine.
Why ‘improve’ on the nativity? Simply put, it makes for better PR, and helps the religion to grow! This mutation of the original facts reminds me of the idea thought that religion is very much like a strand of DNA. The individual elements of the story change and adapt, the better to survive and flourish. Yet throughout, the essence of the story remains.
It was none other than Richard Dawkins who coined the word ‘meme‘ for ideas that grow and evolve, in his famous treatise The Selfish Gene. So I am surprised at the venom with which he and other atheists slag off religion and the preposterous, obviously false claims contained within the Abrahamic texts. If you want the kernel of the Nazarene’s philosophy to survive a couple of millennia of war, disease, natural disaster, shifting borders and mutating languages, then you have to wrap it in parables, fabulism, and sound-bites.* Continue reading
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Following the awful, awful news of the massacre in Conneticut, the gun-control debate has begun afresh in the USA.
The canard from those who support the current, ridiculous status quo, is that the problem lies in “evil people doing evil acts”, and not the availability of weapons. How do the pro-gun advocates reconcile this argument with the doctrine of American exceptionalism?
If one holds that permissive gun laws have no causal connection to the frequent massacres, and that the daily murders are simply caused by evil of people… then one is left with the heretical conclusion that there are simply more evil people in America than elsewhere. This does not sit well with the idea of America being intrisically better than other countries.
Shibboleths collide! Call for Doctor Pangloss!
Parliament, 17th December 2012
Excuse me if I go off on a technical rant for a moment. I find it very irritating when people don’t use HTML mark-up properly. I can forgive the occasional user, or those relying on WYSIWYG editors, but for large, professionally coded websites, there is no excuse for mark-up which does not apply standards correctly.
What has vexed me so? The Houses of Parliament website. In many ways this is a great resource. They offer video of parliamentary debates, and the Hansard of the previous day’s proceedings is posted promptly the following moring. However, the underlying mark-up is flawed. Continue reading
David Beckham, Bradley Wiggins and the Dutchess of Cambridge at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, ExCel, 16th December 2012
I want to draw attention to something particular regarding the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award 2012. It’s best encapsulated in this tweet from Sunder Katwala, who is director of the British Future thinktank:
I love the suggestion that sports people might ‘bid’ for the Sports Personality of the Year trophy, as if it is an Oscar nomination or Presidential campaign that must be plotted and strategised years in advance. The humour lies in the idea that winning a world championship or a gold medal is simply a false peak, a means to an end, with the ultimate pinnacle actually being that little trophy of an old-style TV camera, on a polished wooden stand. Continue reading
https://twitter.com/steishere/status/278802769559818241
Ste complains that a steam train has caused delays to his commute. I find it amazing and bizarre that the station or the rail company have seen fit to pre-record a message, saying that delays are caused by a steam train. Is that a regular an occurrence?
One thing I have always thought particularly sad is that the rail companies have a pre-record for “due to a fatality on the line.” It is clearly a frequent enough occurrence to be a necessary annoucement to have in the library, which is sad in itself. And yet it also offends that something so serious and sombre should be delegated to the robotic system. Perhaps I am being an old fashioned ‘digital immigrant‘, but it feels like the sort of thing that should be announced live. I suppose it is a harsh thing to ask the station managers to do.
My worry stems from the fact that there is a cadence and a timbre to a real voice that a pre-record does not have. When we cede these tasks to a machine, we lose a whole set of human interactions. We only notice this when the subject matter is something so exceptional as a death.
Is this just modernity? Am I being overly sentimental about routine and repetitive information? It is not as if most of these announcements are declarations of love or philosophical debates.
(See also: my piece ‘Encountering the Submerged‘ from almost exactly seven years ago, on the aftermath of a railway suicide I saw in Glasgow; and ‘The Best People Aren’t People‘ about non-human tweeters with personality).