Friday, 20 February 2009

The Catholic Church's Pointless Survey

Well, things must be quiet at the Vatican at the moment. Maybe they have bought off all their child-abuse cases, and the dust is settling and they are sat around a bit bored. Normally I would imagine they create a bunch of saints, or issue a Papal Bull {is there a word missing after "Bull"?} but today they have decided to become market researchers and statisticians...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7897034.stm

Apparently men and women "sin in different ways"..

Am I alone in thinking that this could potentially be the most utterly pointless survey in the history of pointless surveys? Leaving aside that sin is an invented concept, and that doing a survey about it surely has ethical problems (do we think that when in confession, each participant was asked if they minded their data being used for market research purposes?) what "sins" are people "guilty" of? Read the report for the full peer reviewed statistical analysis of the scientifically gathered results.

One of the key ones I can never get my head around is "pride". Why is it a sin to be proud of your achievements? Surely taking pride in ones work is a motivational force - possibly even diminishing the amount of another sin - sloth?

And why are gluttony and greed separated? Surely greed covers gluttony? Doesn't it?

What do I know? I'm not a Catholic.

Tuesday, 17 February 2009

A little bit of fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujUQn0HhGEk

Tim Minchin (following up on his brilliant "Take My Wife") doing a spoken word number called, simply, "Storm".

Brilliant.

Wednesday, 11 February 2009

Write to your MP

Write to your MP. This is serious.

The UK Government has told Geert Wilders to stay at home. He is not welcome on these shores. If you don't know who Geert Wilders is, have a look at the film "Fitna" on Wikileaks. It's a film which plonks passages from the Koran next to images of various nasty things (terrorism, murder etc). The implication being that doing nasty things can be justified using passages from said book.
That literally is all the film is. It's just verses copied verbatim from the Koran and next to those extracts, photos and video of horrors committed by various lunatic muslims.

The British government has basically bowed to pressure (presumably due to fear) and kept the film's maker, who is a member of the Dutch parliament, out of this country. That's all there is to it.

See the letter http://www.geertwilders.nl/images/images/letter-denying-geert-wilders-entry-into-uk.pdf where they say they that his presence in the UK would "pose a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat to one of the fundamental interests of society", to keep him out. And that "The Secretary of State is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK."

Write to your MP. I will be writing to mine tomorrow. Last time I wrote to him, he responded in full, therefore I fully intend to write again. I would urge anyone that reads this to ask their MP to raise the question of what grounds he was barred from this country on. Watch the film. See if you judge it offensive - and - even if it was (which it isn't) is that a good enough reason to bar a man from visiting a supposedly free country? How many gay bashing, hatred of nonbeliever inciting clerics does this country let in per week?

I'll say it one more time. Write to your MP.