Let’s save the world… prove Jesus

I’ve been given a vision, it’s been sanctified and verified by god himself, I claimed his gift of faith, and i have faith that it is so.

If the New Testament of the bible is ‘on the money’ then people really need to know about it, and quickly. You might say that there are plenty of people out there trying but the fact is that they aren’t very good at it. They’ve had 2000 years to do it, and there are still a large majority not realising what happened in Judea. If it’s true that there actually is an afterlife… and unless we tell Jesus we accept his sacrifice we’re doomed to hell… then, well the race to save peoples souls should be on the news on a daily basis - we need a daily updated on the souls saved - maybe involved some sort of tracking technology. So why isn’t it?

I think, in my not so humble opinion that it’s the way  go about telling others… it’s almost like we want to keep it to themselves. We’re happy to leave it to the shouty street preachers… who just come across as deranged and deluded. Or to manipulative and cheesy Alpha Course types.

So how do we do it? We need to find a Unique Selling Point, we need to focus on the things that are common to all of the other non-true religions and leave them to one side. There are millions of decent moral, right thinking, loving people who conscientiously adhere to their factually inaccurate faith. Everyone who has a faith is really convinced that they commune with their respective god, and that he answers them and guides them and has a plan for them (to some degree). Amount and depth of faith isn’t impressive at all… lest we’d all be turning to militant Islam. But they are all of course being deluded by Satan, except for Christians. Simply using manipulative phrases like ‘Jesus loves you, why don’t you accept the free gift’ gets seen for what it is…the religious equivalent of ‘when did you stop beating your wife’.

We must remember that if the NT is a reliable message from god then we know that he loves and wants us all to know about the Jesus salvation narrative. The most wonderful gift he gave us, something no other faith has, is the historical events that happened in Israel 2000 years ago. Let’s not get caught up in the mumbo jumbo and benign brain washing of the worlds churches - lets stop all this obsession with ‘faith’ - we don’t need to rely on faith, we have facts, that’s what Jesus gave us. He didn’t need to, the resurrection could have been a meta-physical spiritual battle or could all have happened in the middle of the desert so we’d never know.

We need to be confident in that, we need to put it all on the table. We need to accept that a loving god wouldn’t make it difficult for us, if we approach the evidence with an open mind and with our logical and rational heads fully screwed on then he will bless that. Logic and rationality are gifts which he gave us, and he insists we use it lest we fall for the devils seductions. In order to prove the truth to the world we have to be open to the idea that the Jesus stories aren’t in fact real, and that the Jewish messiah could still return and ask why we fell for the devils trickery re: the Jesus church.

Let’s not peddle this self-defeating nonsense that Jesus doesn’t want to make it too obvious too us so we can have free will. This belittles our lord, and threatens to be a barrier to salvation as it makes people rightly suspicious. Jesus could have been a lot more subtle if he’d wanted to - maybe appearing for a moment in each of our dreams and giving us the salvation choice. Instead, if we’re to believe the NT he appeared to lots of people doing magical signs to convince them - sometimes 5000 in one go. Are we saying he respected these peoples free will less than ours?

God won’t punish you for applying your reason and rationality and assuming Jesus wasn’t who it’s reported he was… until you’ve assessed the evidence and decided he was (or wasn’t).

It’s like when you were a kid and your dad said… don’t get into a car with any strangers even if they say they that I sent them to pick you up… make sure you are 100% convinced they are who they say they are. I’d rather you rejected someone I might genuinely have sent for you, than get into the car with the wrong person, that’s the actions of a loving parent.

I’m not talking about getting a bishop with a doctorate in theology and an obvious agenda to write a book packed full of ultimately true, but logically very dodgy assumptions. This is the definition of preaching to the choir - this will be accepted with the same open minds that we read Dawkins! Maybe we should sponsor a panel of the worlds smartest and most qualified people, a cross section of the intelligentsia (perhaps those who are currently non-aligned to any religion but who have proven themselves open minded) and get them to carry out a thorough investigation and publish the results at the UN for all to see, where they can be challenged and assessed.

How could anyone object to that? Let’s make sure they report back before the rapture.

Paisley, the pope and me

[greatest ‘hits’ redux]   

 

School was boring, most of the time I wanted to be doing something else and the worst time was always from after lunch to home time. I used to sit beside a guy called Mark, whose dad was the assistant Minster at Ian Paisleys Martyrs Memorial church. He was good craic and we usually spent the time chatting and drawing silly cartoons to while away the hours until the bus came to take us back to the Gilnahirk ‘hood.

Occasionally he’d tell me that Big Ian was round at the house/manse for dinner the previous evening or that he was joining Paisley and his dad protesting outside some den of iniquity (or something or other). He even roped me in one time to going door to door with DUP European election leaflets - im embarrassed at the thought.

One Monday afternoon, after a double PE he told me that his dad was off to Brussels today to kick the pope (exact words). I enquired further and discovered that his holiness John Paul II was addressing the European parliament, so his dad and Paisley where heading over to voice their disagreement with some of JP’s theological musings.

I turned on the six of clock news that night to see Big Ian being dragged out of the chamber by his ankles, shouting. I RENOUNCE THEE THE ANTI-CHRIST… I RENOUNCCCCCE THEE THE ANTI-CHRIST!! There standing beside him was Mark’s dad, holding his papers - he was dead proud in school the next day.

Got to admit, it’s getting better

 

Again this is just a nugget of a thought, non parsed, ill thought out and under researched. What t’internet was made for! It’s a topic I’ve touched on before a little bit, so you’d think I’d have worked out what I was trying to say, but alas…

A week or two ago we’d some Jehovah’s Witnesses or something come to our door to tell us the good news that the world was going to pot, all we have to do is turn on the news to see what a state the world is in.

That kinda attitude disproportionally annoys me… how can someone claim that the world is getting worse? Bad things happen, but they always have and to say that the world is somehow ‘getting worse’ shows an embarrassingly naive knowledge of history.Never mind world wars, work houses, slavery, plagues… for goodness sake, its only 20-30 years since the world was on the cusp of complete nuclear annihilation… now that the threat of this has somewhat receded, can Mr Witness at least admit that a spate of stabbings on the local Points West news (the example he gave), while tragic, is small bananas… and the very fact that it makes the news, is a positive.

TwoBigYellowCranes (regular commenter) brings to light the tragic case of the man who was killed last week in Belfast, in front of his pregnant wife. I’m not saying that TBYC isn’t right to highlight this, but i remember the days, all too well when this wouldn’t even have got a mention on the local news, because of all the other tribal killings, shootings and punishment beatings. We do ourselves a disservice by not recognising progress. Sometimes the glass IS half full.

Reasons to be cheerful:
Child mortality at record low
Gap between crime rates and fear of crime
UK homicide rates failing (note that the 2000-2003 jump is seen as largely down to better recording)
Life expectancy set to soar

What price truth?

It’s revealed this week that the Bloody Sunday enquiry has now cost £180m! One of the relatives was quoted as saying “You can’t put a price on it” Well, I think you can. We could have given the families £12m each in blooming compensation, if I was the family of one of those killed I’d far prefer that to hearing some judge saying ‘ok, looks like they were unlawfully killed’.

Is every other killing in Northern Ireland going to be investigated in the same way? Are the lives of these 14 somehow worth more? Somehow more tragic and more in need of investigation?

To compare - how much of the Iraqi tax payer’s money would we recommend they spend in 30 years time investigating the 950 Shiites who died in the bombs and stampede tragedy a few years ago - I work that out at £12billion. The sad thing is that large killings and bombings in Iraq don’t even make the news these days - yet the truth about 14 killings 40 years ago during a de facto civil war is worth £180m to people - i don’t get it.

Osama Jones

Its poor blogging to chat about stuff you saw on TV, it says something about a life wasted. But i am what i am.

There were two nice happy happy documentaries on last night, both set in the late seventies. The first was a Storyville special about the Jonesville Suicide death cult and the other was a historical look at America’s involvement in Afghanistan - which is topical I suppose with the release of the movie ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’.

First to Jonesville - this was one of the most depressing things I’ve seen. To give some background, Jim Jones was a cult leader/preacher in America in the late 70s who led a church called the People’s Temple. It was thousands strong, multi racial and counter cultural. A lot of the services were filmed, giving us lots of material of ‘healings’ and conversions and euphoric people selling their homes to give money to the church. Jim Jones then had a great idea to set up a new town in the South American rain forest and bring all his followers there. To cut a long story sort it all went sour when a congressman flew out there to investigate them (with some reporters)… all seemed idyllic until a couple of the members started passing notes to the reporters asking to be rescued… when they tried to leave Jones’ men shot and killed them along with the congressmen. This was all caught on film as one of the cameramen who died left his camera running.

It was gruelling to watch, especially then Jones then gathered up the 1000 people and told them that they would all have to die, and supplied the cyanide. There were no pictures of this but everything was taped through the PA system, letting us hear babies being wrestled from their mothers and poisoned, people pleading for their lives and ultimately the silence when everyone was dead. Three people survived by running into the jungle, and they told the story as we listened to the soundtrack. Gruelling. I’m not all that emotional or sentimental but I had to go and wake my baby son up to give him a hug after watching it - of course making him cry for the next half hour, doh!

Next was the retrospective from Afghanistan. This got my gander up a bit (always helpful when it comes to blogging). Some people have such a selective remembering of history, and are so accusing and self-righteous when using their 20/20 hind sight. In the late 70s when the world teetered on the brink of a nuclear holocaust which would have rendered the entirety of human progress and charity meaningless, the USSR invaded Afghanistan to set up a puppet communist regime. America decided to fund and assist the Afghan freedom fighters, a no-brainer really. But the narrative of this program seemed to be that American was stupid and immoral for backing the likes of Bin Laden and are now reaping a deserved whirlwind. Most of the interviewees were from countries who decided to spend their money on nicer hospitals and social welfare, and let bad old America step up to the plate of saving the world (hyperbole a go-go).

Anyway… this is too long a rant. All I’ll say is… if you travelled back in time to 1980 and told people that the Afghans they funded in the war against the USSR will turn on you after the year 2000, and you’ll get some problems with terror attacks, and a few thousand will be killed in New York. They would have run around the pentagon high-fiving saying… you mean we averted nuclear war!!?

Happiness, Happiness, the greatest gift that I posses

(Bonus points for anyone who knows the toothly comic who made the song famous)

Ok, I read the BBC news web site too much, and I watch too many news programs, and get agitated if I go more than a few hours without knowing what new things have happened in the world (or at least what ‘news worthy’ things have happened). I have a problem.

What is obvious, very quickly is that what is considered news worthy is really just a mater of what will get an emotional reaction from the viewers. In short… bad news and scare stories.

ICM did a recent survey for the BBC on family life in Britain, by all accounts it was exhaustive. The problem is that it didn’t give the right result. The right ‘news worthy’ result was of course the tragic decline in society and family life. However Ninety-three percent of us described our family lives as fairly or very happy. More of us considered that our parents did their best for us, thought of our families as close and are optimistic about their futures than felt those ways in previous polls going back decades.

The BBC’s home editor Mark Easton said “I think our expectation was that we would be measuring the extent to which people’s closest relationships were suffering as a result of the decline in traditional family structures. When the results came in, we had a surprise.”

Easton suggests several explanations for the poll’s cheerful findings and the anticipated tale of woe: our standards may have changed; we’re mostly better off; we can travel and telephone more easily, which means that family links can be better maintained. He also remarks on the boom in interest in genealogy and family trees. Perhaps this last point gives a clue to a much bigger reason why 21st-century families say they’re happier: it’s simply that they work harder at it these days.

The political conversation these days seems to be all about making families more stable. But I wonder what this poll says about that. Is stability really the Holy Grail for the family? Maybe flexibility and diversity is really what brings or families happiness.

[There's a wider post needed on the idea of our perception of reality, as given to us by news broadcasters. It's the old adage that everyone thinks the NHS is rubbish, but if you ask 10 people about their ‘personal' experience of the NHS it's usually glowing! TV tells them that it's rubbish, so they think... whoa I must have been really lucky, because I thought it was great! Maybe a similar thing has happened with the family survey.]

No words needed

I wanna be like you hoo hoo

I’m not really a ‘Mr Angry’ character, if I was I would probably be a better and opinionated blogger. I tend to give celebs and people in newspapers the benefit of the doubt - saying things like. I don’t really know Peter Andre, who am I to have an opinion on him, likewise Jade Goody or Prince Philip. I say this as cover for the fact that once in a while a someone says something, or a story emerges that really gets to me and makes me into ‘Mr Angry from Bristol’.

My local infant school recently made the local Points West news over a teacher racism scandal. Click here to read the story on BBC.

I’ll paraphrase it. The school was putting on production for parents of Jungle Book, when the teacher was apportioning out roles, she asked the 7 year olds, who wants to be a monkey? Of course, every hand was pushed high in the air, and the teacher chose 5 kids. Two of the kids were black brothers (I mean they WERE actually brothers).

That’s pretty much the story. When the they got home they excitedly told their mum and step father (indecently their step father is white). At this point the parents hit the roof, and demanded an explanation from the school, and the suspension of the teacher. Why? Because it was racist to cast the black kids as monkeys.

There was a massive hoopla with BBC Points West covering the story for a couple of days and newspaper interviews from teachers and parents at the school.

It made me really sad. What on earth did these parents think they were doing. What exactly did they want the teacher to say… “sorry kids you can’t be monkeys because some idiots in the 1970s used to use monkey as a derogatory term for blacks”.

My son will quite likely go to this school in a few years, and it really annoys me the idea that he would come home from school asking why his friend Billy wasn’t allowed to be a monkey because he’s black.

The MOST annoying thing is, that the school seemed to pander to the parents, instead of laughing them out the school… or maybe make them attend some basic classes!

What’s that they say, political correctness gone mad.
There you go… once you’ve typed that phrase in a blog, you really ARE “Mr Angry”.

Some nice pod casts

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/podcast.xml

Paste that into your iTunes postcast bit… the best one, i think, if the Stephen Fry/Hitchens one on blasphemy - interesting as always. The theos among you will like his references to CS Lewis. If only that tw*t Hitchens would shut up a bit, which he does, after someone in the crowd shouts at him .

I think Stephen Fry is great but i think, as i say, Hitchens is on of the most annoying arrogant people on earth. Even though i agree with the large part of what he says - which just shows that sometimes it about ‘how you say it’.

You can listen to the MP3 here.  The first ten mins and the last ten mins are the best.

It’s not exactly a ‘debate’ as both are in more or less in agreement. It reminds me somewhat of those Greenbelt ‘debates’ i used occasionaly attend (but in the other direction).

House price inflation

I was reading on the Internet today and hearing on the news that UK population is predicted to grow to 71 million by 2031. The first thing i thought of was, for the foreseeable future we’re looking at a housing shortage aren’t we? Demand is going to dwarf supply, what will that do to the market? Can’t be good. Overall though, there’s plenty of space - just not enough houses!

Fox News started the Calafornia fires

Just when you think Fox News can’t get any worse. They imply that Al Qaeda might be responsible for the California fires.

Scaremongering ? us ?

Iraq war. Good thing/bad thing?

Obviously at the moment it seems like a silly question, and its hard to look to the future and see a time, when it would be anything other than that. But, is there scenario which would see the Iraq war being looked back on as, although mismanaged and very painful, worth it?

The Vietnam war is largely looked back on as a disastrous mistake, but the Korean war is largely looked back on as a painful necessity. Both had similar goals of halting Communist aggression, and both had major casualties. Counted in hundreds of thousands, rather than the hundreds and thousands of the Iraq war.

I know that there is a seriously dodgy ethic when it comes to ‘imposing’ democracy, but if a reasonably stable and prosperous Iraqi democracy emerges in the next five to ten years, will history look back on the war differently?

I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries recently about the Independence movement in India, and been struck by the turmoil, uncertainty and recriminations at the time. With almost a million people dying in the Muslim/Hindu fighting that followed the formation of Pakistan. The wounds of Independence have taken decades to heal, and looking back I’m sure many people would have done many things differently. But at the end of the day, India is emerging as a stable, reasonably peaceful free democracy. Can Iraq be the same? And can it’s success spread throughout the region?  Am i ridiculously optimistic?

The Cult of Princess Diana

What would it take for Diana to be regarded as a prophet from god?

My answer is, as you’d expect is not very much (otherwise it would be a more rubbish post).

I saw a picture on the front of a newspaper recently of a man on his knees at the gates of Buckingham palace praying  in front of a picture of Diana, surrounded by flowers. The notion occurred to me, was Diana a goddess of sorts, or at least in less enlightened times, could in 50-100 years have a reasonable religious following.

How far would things need to be exaggerated for it to be said that she healed people with AIDS, and preached love and understanding? How hard would it be to find apostles who said that she changed their lives for the better? And that she was persecuted for her beliefs and cast out of the royal family etc

A guy called Joseph Smith claimed to have dug up some gold plates in America in the early 1800s, and said that it was a message from god, and revelation about the way forward. A man, who believes this, is now in with a reasonable chance of becoming President.

Maybe in these days of 24 hour news and intimate inquiry into every part of celebrity the Diana Cult wouldn’t last long - but who knows  (see scientology)- I wouldn’t be surprised if King William IV’s son is head of the English Church of Diana

food for thought, or at least a curly wurly for thought.

People who died on the same day

I was reading something in Wikipedia (as is my occasional want) about Mother Teresa, and found out that she died within a week of Princess Diana, I’ve no hard feelings about Diana, but perhaps she was handier to mourn than Teresa. (Incidentally my own mother died a few months before Diana - so it did seem a bit strange to see grown people weeping in the streets for someone they never met).

Another one of these occurrences is CS Lewis, the eminent British scholar and writer, who died the same day as JFK. And talking of Presidents, Jefferson and the first Adams went to that great rose garden in the sky within hours of each other in 1826. It is still unclear whether it was Frankie Howard or Benny Hill who had the last laugh as they died within hours of each other in 1992: Benny’s publicist issued a statement in his client’s name regretting the other’s death - ‘We were great, great friends’ - not realising that Benny was, in the deepest sense, unavailable for comment.

Animal extinction – should we care?

Last week there was world wide concern, nay despair (ok, maybe not despair) that the Yangtze River Dolphin might become extinct. Is it harsh to say that I don’t really care? Or for that mater about any extinction really… do we really miss the Dodo? Animals go extinct all the time, its not like we’re gonna run out - it’s the circle of life - survival of the fittest. Its a loosing battle to try and preserve the preservable.

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about that - lets be honest, not the most interesting post in the world. Nice pic though.