Computer games don't affect kids, I mean if Pac Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music.
I was rather appalled to find some comments by Nick Griffin about Haiti on the BBC website. They're from a couple of weeks ago, and apparently he published them on his Twitter site.
Mr Griffin's original postings, on Facebook and Twitter, said: "While the Haiti earthquake is terrible, the winter death toll in Britain will be similar. No aid here though."
About 45,000-50,000 people have died since Tuesday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince and 300,000 have been made homeless, according to UN estimates.
The Pan American Health Organization has estimated that the death toll could be as high as 100,000.
Now, it is estimated that there will be something like 45,000 extra deaths this winter, which is high, but nowhere near 100,000 (and I have heard reports on the news that it could be up to 150,000).
In response to criticism, Griffin and his deputy Simon Darby refused to back down. Griffin wrote,
"Individuals should give whatever they feel appropriate, but Britain is bankrupt. Fifty thousands pensioners will die... of cold this winter.
"Boys get blown to bits because we can't afford to armour their Land Rovers.... Sending aid to rioting ingrates while our own people die is stinking elite hypocrisy."
I suppose it shouldn't have surprised me that Griffin should make such comments, given the kinds of things he has said before. But it did – there is a total lack of compassion for anyone outside his little box, no concept of humanity as a whole.
When asked about Griffin's comments, Darby said,
"I'd rather see that £6m that we spent keeping our own people alive. You look after your own first.
"If they've got surplus money to give away to Haiti – how many people have died because we didn't have the infrastructure to grit the roads?"
Now, I can see where statements like this come from – 'charity begins at home' and all that – after all, it wouldn't be right for children to starve just so their parents could give generously to Comic Relief. But that is an example in extremis. If you wait until you are sorted yourself, if you give away only your 'surplus', how much help would we wealthy westerners be to the developing world, whose poverty is often a direct result of our own exploitation of their natural resources?
Any sensible person knows that you are never 'sorted'. There are always extra expenses, more things we 'need'. Our country's infrastructure cannot be sorted for £6m, but many lives can be saved in Haiti. We share a common humanity with these so-called 'rioting ingrates', and the responsibility of those who have to help those who don't would, I suspect, look very different to Griffin and Darby were Haiti the rich developed nation, and Britain the poor country hit by a devastating earthquake.
Charity does not begin at home, and we should not look after our own when we should be helping others. Yes, we need to be sensible and help elderly people pay their fuel bills, maintain our country's road network, etc etc, but we also have a responsibility to help those in dire need, all over the world, simply because they are people too, and no less deserving to live than we are.
The right to live belongs to all humans everywhere – even Nick Griffin and Simon Darby.
Don't you wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There's one marked 'Brightness,' but it doesn't work.
Since I upgraded to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) I have been unable to download programmes using the BBC iPlayer Desktop. It worked fine before, but the upgrade killed it.
I tried uninstalling it, removing it using AppCleaner, uninstalling Adobe AIR, restarting etc etc, and eventually just gave up.
Today however I solved the problem!
I uninstalled iPlayer Desktop using AppCleaner, and then deleted the directory:
~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/AIR
Where ~/ is your home directory.
I then went back to the iPlayer website, reinstalled iPlayer Desktop, and now all works fine!
I hope this helps someone else.
Now often I find art stupid, rubbish, pretentious, etc etc – I'm sure it's because I don't understand it.
This this is stupendously good – I genuinely couldn't believe my eyes the first time I saw it..
Over the years I have frequently thought about the relationship between the uncompromising ethical stance of much of the New Testament (not least the Sermon on the Mount), and salvation as the free gift of God, through the cross, while we were still God's enemies.
With the help of various theologians (John Calvin, Karl Barth etc), as well as sustained reflection on the Bible (not just the New Testament) I have come to think of it in terms of a response. We are given a free gift of live, salvation through Jesus Christ, which we must live out. We must live a life worthy of the calling we have received.
But of course the context of that life is always that it is a free gift. We didn't earn it in the first place, and we can't mess up so badly that there is no way back. We can't lose our salvation in Christ through our failure to live it out. There is nothing we can do that is so bad God won't forgive us—if we repent.
And right there is the crux of the issue. We can stuff things up terribly, but if we repent and turn back to God, he will forgive us our sin and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Although our sin cuts us off from God, there is always a way back, through the cross, if we repent.
Unrepentance I think comes in two guises: first, refusing to repent of what we know is sinful behaviour (this is the most obvious kind); second (more subtly perhaps), failing to acknowledge that we are simul iustus et peccatore, at once justified and sinner, and that we do mess things up.
The first is perhaps more common in our individual lives, the second much more common in our communities. In many (evangelical) churches I have been privileged to be a part of, there has been an unspoken culture / expectation that actually things are all right for everyone. Maybe that's my perception, I don't know, but that's how I've felt.
When the culture is like that, it is very difficult for individuals to acknowledge serious failures. Yeah we can all say a confession, I haven't put God first, that kind of stuff, but when there is a serious problem, the sense of failure is so strong that it is difficult to tell anyone, because you are worried they will judge you for not being a good enough Christian (or whatever).
I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that. Often in churches it can feel as if we are expected to be perfect, so when things aren't it is very difficult to talk to anyone about it. Somehow we need to create an atmosphere in which failure (privately and publicly), while not accepted as 'right', is not condemned or judged, but accepted as 'real' and worked through, drawing on God's grace and power.
We need to create communities of grace (I'm sure I've not made that phrase up, but I don't know where it's come from), which accept sinners, but challenge sin and encourage an atmosphere of repentance and forgiveness.
We need not to expect people to be perfect, or even close, but to be real about the messed-up world we live in, that things don't always work out, that people get things wrong, that we all do, just some of us more obviously than others. People need to be aware of all that, so they feel comfortable and able to be real and honest, to share where they are really at, so that sin can be dealt with in God's way (by repentance and forgiveness) rather than being allowed to fester within our congregations.
I watched an excellent programme on BBC One last night, called the Narnia Code.
One of the points of the documentary was that CS Lewis preferred a medieval understanding of the universe to the modern scientific one, which he claimed made things cold and mechanical.
A couple of the interviewees (which included John Polkinghorne) made this point: science is very good at answering its own questions (how does this work, what happens if we do this, etc).
But there are two important questions that science can't answer:
Why is there something rather than nothing?
Why is nature ordered and comprehensible?
I'm sure there are others, but these two are a good start. This is from The Voyage of the Dawntreader:
"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."
"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of."
We need to ask both kinds of questions, I think – and use science and theology together to enrich our understanding of the universe.
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