If, as according to some Christians, alcohol is so bad,
why did Jesus turn water into wine?
Category Archives: ramblings
Marriage
There’s recently been a lot of brouhaha over the UK government’s suggestion of making marriage available to (male and female) homosexual couples.
The Christian churches are up in arms because they see it as devaluing (or worse) the sacrament of marriage.
Put plainly, this is bollox.
Neither the church, nor any other religion, owns marriage. Arguably it may have done once, in the days before developed civil government, but no longer. In almost every civilised country there is a civil marriage option available as well as a religious one. The churches may have a ceremony which they call marriage. This does not mean they own the concept or the sole rights, although it does give them the right to choose who to allow to partake in their ceremony.
A heterosexual couple can have a civil marriage, so why can’t a homosexual couple? No-one is suggesting that the churches have to be a part of this if they wish not to. They are not to be obliged to marry homosexual couples and indeed they may choose (as they do now) who can marry under their aegis. Many heterosexual couples are denied a religious marriage for a whole variety of reasons.
And of course no couple has to marry or enter into any officially sanctioned partnership arrangement. And quite right too. So a coach and horses has already been driven through marraige as originally conceived by the churches.
I fail to see a problem.
There are couples who will choose a civil marriage and couples who will choose a religious marriage. Civil marriage will be available to all; religious marriage will only be available to those who can jump some arbitrary set of church defined hurdles. Just as now.
And come couples will choose to ignore the whole idea of marriage (by whatever name) and just live together. Horses for courses, and all that.
No change, really, except that the civil marriage net is being widened.
Although there is the suggestion of an anomaly with civil partnerships. As gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has pointed out the current proposals now discriminate against heterosexuals by allowing same-sex couples the option of marriage or civil partnerships but only marriage for heterosexual couples. Which is ludicrous!
I see no purpose in continuing with the civil partnership sham. Let’s drop it altogether and have just civil marriages. Either that or we have to keep both civil partnerships and civil marriages for all.
Or of course we could just ban marriage altogether — for everyone.
For other sane views you might like to read Betty Herbert’s blog, John Bingham in the Daily Telegraph and Marie Jackson on BBC News.
So You Missed … ?
More links to things you may have missed. Let’s start with some important items I should write whole blog posts about but just can’t stomach today.
Like I commented on Facebook, this first isn’t just wrong, or bizarre, or cruel, it’s obscene (and that’s not a word I use lightly or often). Georgia Rep Wants To Force Women To Carry Stillborn Fetuses … Like Cows Do. Maybe these loonies should be made to wear a stinking albatross round their necks. As has been said elsewhere if men had to endure half the things they impose on women better ways would soon be found, or minds changed. What price Christian charity? Again! Seethe!
Next, here’s an interesting alternative take on the validity (or not) of modern Christian claims of persecution. As it’s from the National Secular Society it’s probably as biased in the opposite direction! Caveat emptor!
Both of which remind me of this cartoon …
And while we’re on the church, let’s have an interesting sideways look from Friday’s FT, which shows just how bizarre is the Cathodic church’s attitude to gay marriage.
And here’s a worrying judgement handed down by the European Court of Human Rights, supporting the UK courts’ decisions, which appears to give the police carte blanche to do almost anything they like on the streets to restrict liberty, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and association. Very, very worrying.
And a final rant for today … this confirms what I maintained the other day that water companies are losing vast amounts of their water through leaks — possibly as much as 25%!
So now for an interesting piece of science. Apparently your soul is in your eyeballs. Yes really. Well actually it does make sense and does seem to agree with one’s intuitive experience.
So how do we think about nothing? This gives two totally different approaches.
And finally something rather splendid: an old church converted into a modern bookstore.
It takes the Dutch to find some good in Christianity. 🙂
Crossings Out
So the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Dr Rowan Williams, is standing down in nine months time. Appropriate timing? Is he being transmogrified into the Virgin Mary?
Meanwhile he has plenty of time to come out with a few more inanities.
Today, the day that he announced his pregnancy capitulation, he has said that wearing the cross does not offend non-Christians.
How can he possibly know? He isn’t a non-Christian.
Oh! Maybe he is! After all he’s Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s well known that Archbishops of Canterbury can believe six impossible things before breakfast. Recall too that memorable line from the Eric Idle version of the “List Song” in the ENO production of The Mikado:
Bishops who don’t believe in God
Chief Constables who do.
Full lyric here (complete with a couple of errors) and a video on YouTube (the list Song starts about 4m15s in).
To Be or To Change?
Here’s Zen teacher Brad Warner on becoming something you’re not, but think you want to be. This is taken from his Hardcore Zen weblog.
[T]he effort to be something you’re not always seems to go wrong no matter what it is you want to be …
People who are working on fulfilling some image they have of a “nice person” are usually a pain in the ass. Their efforts to be like the “nice person” they’ve invented in their heads almost always get in the way of actually doing what needs to be done … The kind of forced helpfulness such people engage in is almost never helpful at all. It’s annoying. Sometimes it’s even harmful.
But those of us who realize that we actually aren’t as good as we could be have a real dilemma. What do you do when you recognize that you really are greedy, envious, jealous, angry, pessimistic and so on and on and on?
To me, it seems like the recognition of such things is itself good enough. It’s not necessary to envision a better you and try to remake yourself in that image. Just notice yourself being greedy and very simply stop being greedy. Not for all time in all cases. Just in whatever instance you discover yourself being greedy. If you’re greedy on Tuesday for more ice cream, don’t envision a better you somewhere down the line who is never greedy for more ice cream. Just forgo that last scoop of ice cream right now. See how much better you feel. This kind of action, when repeated enough, becomes a new habit. Problem solved.
Which is really very much how I felt at work, and still feel, about personal development. Trying to totally restructure someone to be different (say, totally embodying that great new sales technique) doesn’t work and is actually destructive of their personality. Indeed it is tantamount to brainwashing.
I need to be told about it, sure. Then I need to notice, in my own quiet way, the bits that work for me and try using them or incorporating them in what I do. That way I build on the existing strength of my personality, rather than destroying it and starting over.
No wonder I never fitted the company mould, and management didn’t like it!
Change not only has to come from within it has to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
29 February
Today, 29 February, is a unique day. So unique it happens, to a first approximation, only every four years.
But that, of course, depends upon what value unique has in your philosophy.
Scientifically today is indeed unique, in the formally correct sense. There is no other like it, for it will never occur again, at least as far as we currently understand the laws of physics which govern our universe.
Why? Because time, that ethereal quantity we measure in todays and years, is unidirectional and ever progressing. This time, this very instant, can never occur again. Hence it must be that this, and every other, today must be unique.
Enjoy your once in a lifetime experience!
Thought of the Day
Courtesy of Thoughts of Angel …
If heat makes things expand, then I’m not FAT … I’m just really HOT!
All Over the Garden
Oh God it’s going to be a day of giant rhubarb news stories.
Following on from Chancellor Osborne’s apparently sudden realisations, our beloved Metropolitan Police have issued a list of plants we should all have to deter burglars.
Yeah OK, so far.
The news report finishes with the Met’s advice that Hedges and shrubs in the front garden should be kept to a height of no more than three feet in order to avoid giving a burglar a screen behind which he can conceal himself.
Leaving aside, for a moment, the implication that female felons don’t try to hide, there’s a problem with this. The list of suggested plants includes Gunnera manicata (above; deciduous and grows to 2.5m), Golden Bamboo (grows to 3.5m) and several conifers, none of which are susceptible to being pruned or trimmed successfully to under 1 metre nor are really suitable for the average suburban garden.
Duh!
<Paging Alan Titchmarsh>
Spring Rolls
Well, we’re rolling on towards Spring anyway. And just to prove it here are some photos from our garden today.
First the snowdrops. We have only a couple of small clusters under the apple tree but they’re still looking good …
Most of the early mauve crocuses are now past their best, partly I think due to last week’s breezes knocking them over. But here are a couple that are still good.
I especially like this one …
And finally a feral pigeon enjoying the Spring sunshine between bouts of feeding and rutting.
The photo doesn’t show off the wonderful iridescent pink and green shades on their necks and breasts which are really stunning when they catch the light right. Well who wouldn’t want iridescent pink breasts?
Fukushima Revisited
In yesterday’s Daily Telegraph there was a very interesting perspective on the TĹŤhoku earthquake disaster, almost a year on, from journalist Michael Hanlon in which he argues:
The world has forgotten the real victims of Fukushima
A natural disaster that cost the lives of thousands of people was
ignored in favour of a nuclear ‘disaster’ that never was
In the article Hanlon says, and I quote directly as I cannot say it with such conviction …
Most terrible of all, was the black wave, a tide of death which we saw apparently creeping over the landscape …
Hundreds, thousands of people were being killed before my eyes [and] like all journalists, I began writing about the disaster much as I had written about the 2004 earthquake and tsunamis which had devastated the coasts of the Indian Ocean.
But then something odd happened. When it became clear the waves had struck a nuclear power plant, Fukushima Dai-ichi … it was almost as if the great disaster we had witnessed had been erased from view. Suddenly, all the reports concentrated on the possibility of a reactor meltdown, the overheating fuel rods, and the design flaws in this ancient plant …
[A]round day three … I realised that something had gone seriously wrong with the reporting of the biggest natural disaster to hit a major industrialised nation for a century. We had forgotten the real victims, the 20,000-and-counting Japanese people killed, in favour of a nuclear scare story …
[N]ot only was the global media’s reaction to the Tohoku earthquake skewed in favour of a nuclear “disaster” that never was, but that this reporting had profound economic and even environmental implications …
[A]lthough outdated, riddled with design flaws and struck by geological forces that went way beyond the design brief, the Fukushima plant had survived remarkably intact.
There are bitter ironies in all of this … governments in Europe, including ours, were offering to fly expats home from places where the radiation levels were lower than the natural background count in Aberdeen or Cornwall.
As Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, says: “The reporting of Fukushima was guided by the Cold War reflex that matched radiation with fear and mortal danger. Reactors have been destroyed, but the radiation at Fukushima has caused no loss of life and is unlikely to do so, even in the next 50 years. The voices of science and common sense on which the future of mankind depends were drowned out and remain to be heard, even today. The result has been unnecessary suffering and great socio-economic damage.” …
[P]olicymakers should have waited until at least some science was in before cancelling programmes which, in the case of Germany, will lead to some 70 million metric tonnes annually of increased CO2 emissions, because the shortfall will almost certainly be met by coal-fired power. Nobody, to date, has died as a result of radiation leaks at Fukushima Dai-ichi. Zero — a number you will have read even less about than the 20,000 dead.
Yes, OK, I’m guilty as well. But then as a scientist I was at least concerned to try to keep the nuclear problems in perspective — as my posts over the months will testify. Nonetheless there has been a humanitarian disaster which we have all quietly forgotten. Shame on us!