Blogging on and off since 2003
From today’s New York Times:
Senator Charles E. Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is investigating six prominent evangelistic ministries to determine whether they have illegally used donations to finance opulent lifestyles.
What a suggestion! I’m shocked!!! In other news, the pot and kettle argue about the rights to Black®, and woodland bears discuss their bowel movements.
“I never wanted to be a religious affairs correspondent,” begins Simon Stephen Bates in his essay Demob happy. Naturally we expect this to be followed by his aspirations to lumberjacking, but no. Let’s be serious for a minute. “I had always regarded it as a slippers and pipe sort of a job, to be given to ageing hacks in beige cardigans working their way towards retirement. So when the editor of the Guardian asked me to do the job in 2000, on my return from five years as the paper’s European Affairs Editor in Brussels, I thought he was trying to tell me something about the inexorable downward trajectory of a once moderate career.”
And so begins an account of his seven year gig at the Guardian. It’s pretty clear that this is an area in which familiarity breeds contempt, or at least a numbing despair. “What faith I had, I’ve lost, I am afraid – I’ve seen too much, too close.” Eventually…
Faltering in the face of so much theology, I decided to cover church issues politically. As a former lobby correspondent, I felt that the disputes were more explicable in such terms… indeed some conservative evangelicals are using tactics remarkably similar to the old Militant Tendency to infiltrate the Church of England these days.
What now? Bates is moving on to pastures new; meanwhile Paul Sims ((Editor of the New Humanist.)) reports that “his successor at the Guardian, Riazatt Butt, has become the first Muslim to be appointed as religious correspondent by a national newspaper.”
I’ll await his demob report with interest.
Just to prove that stupidity innumeracy knows no national borders, we have a classic example from the UK, courtesy Good Math, Bad Math. The context: a lottery game which involved identifying which numbers (temperatures) were less than some target. And some of the numbers were negative…
On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.
I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.
It’s interesting to relate this (common) kind of innumeracy with the “naive physics” that Pinker describes in his books. Perhaps the world isn’t ready for negative numbers; anyone for °Kelvin?
Ed’s reporting that the Belgian Police have been investigating Scientology since 1997:
Now, 10 years and 76 cartons of documents later, prosecutors say the evidence points to one conclusion: The Church of Scientology in Belgium is a “criminal organization” that has used fraud and extortion to separate members from their money.
But we already knew that, didn’t we?
Hear, hear! I wish we saw more of this kind of thing:
Defence Minister Lord Drayson has taken a “leave of absence” from the government in a bid to take part in the world-famous 24-hour Le Mans race.
The only downside is that the kind of person who is willing to give up political power in order to follow his or her dream is probably the kind of person we want in government….
Greta Christina’s posted a long, passionate piece entitled Atheists and Anger. I’ve been thinking about writing something like this for a couple of months, but now I can just endorse her magnum opus.
The bottom line:
I’ll acknowledge that anger is a difficult tool in a social movement. A dangerous one even. It can make people act rashly; it can make it harder to think clearly; it can make people treat potential allies as enemies. In the worst-case scenario, it can even lead to violence. Anger is valid, it’s valuable, it’s necessary… but it can also misfire, and badly.
But unless we’re actually endangering or harming somebody, it is not up to believers to tell atheists when we should and should not use this tool. It is not up to believers to tell atheists that we’re going too far with the anger and need to calm down. Any more than it’s up to white people to say it to black people, or men to say it to women, or straights to say it to queers. When it comes from believers, it’s not helpful. It’s patronizing. It comes across as another attempt to defang us and shut us up. And it’s just going to make us angrier.
It’s the intermission… I’m at the 5th Avenue Theatre, attending a sparkling performance of Sondheim’s “Into The Woods”. It’s been years since I last saw a musical, and I can’t imagine a better choice to break the drought. It’s simply wonderful.
Almost time for the second half. What if “happily ever after” isn’t the end…? 🙂
[Later]
That was a really wonderful performance. It’s a local production, not touring, and it’s only running for one more week so if you’re in the Seattle area you owe it to yourself to go. Seattlechannel.org has posted a nice video clip about the production.
Your vote is needed in the Best Comic Strip section of the 2007 Weblog Awards. And there’s only one choice, really: xkcd. Off you go…
Check out Animator vs. Animation II by *alanbecker. Desktop icons will never seem the same…
Some years ago there were stories of RFI mucking about with garage door openers. Now we have the “Satanic car key”. As we rely more and more on wireless replacements for mechanical systems, there will be lots of opportunities for “interesting” distributed systems failures…
Stranded motorists in Kent were forced to turn to Ofcom after a rogue car’s central locking system took possession of other vehicles in the same Gravesend car park. More than 12 cars at the Parrock Street car park in the comfortable yet earthy Medway town decided not to open or start on Tuesday, the Beeb reports. […] The regulator’s boffins said they eventually traced the problem to “a small family car [that] was intermittently sending out signals blocking other fobs in a 164ft (50m) radius”.