The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence

Prayer - Better Than Broadband?

This sign appear outside my local church the other day.

And I just wondered, does anyone actually believe this? Do the people in this church really believe it? I know that in my more evangelical days I had a more 'hotline' view of prayer - but surely this idea that we can have immediate access to God is just a bare-faced lie? I'm tempted to 'go inside and find out more,' because I'd be interested to know how they would explain to someone who was sick and got immediate access to God that God was very likely to tell them to just deal with it.

Perhaps some people do have this sort of day-to-day experience of prayer. I'd have thought most were on some sort of dial-up. Or worse. We are obsessed with immediacy of connection, of course - higher speeds and more wide coverage. But its helping no one to try to pretend God behaves the same way.

Technorati: Broadband | Prayer

Real Snail Mail | Slowed Down Technology

The people at 'Boredom Research Labs’ have designed ‘the world’s first webmail service using real live snails.’

Yes you read that correctly.

Actually, the thinking behind the project, or at least post-event justification, is to slow technology down, as a form of discipline or meditation. You send your email in the normal way, and this is then stored in a device in the snail’s tank. When a snail, fitted with a RF chip, crawls by, the data is loaded onto the chip. When that snail eventually passes another device, the information is passed from the RF chip, and the mail is delivered as usual. You therefore have no idea when your message is going to eventually be delivered.

Completely barking. But rather nice.

Technorati Tags: snail,mail,slow

Into Great Silence ¦ Sound Pollution

I enjoy most things about city life, but one of the perennial frustrations is noise. Light pollution, on the micro scale at least, is fairly easy to manage. We can shut our curtains or buy special blinds, and shut our eyes if need be. And, while some objects are foul to look at, we only need turn our heads...

Sound, on the other hand, is a far more difficult sense. It doesn't 'shadow' well, and is extremely difficult to insulate against, far harder than light. Noise is therefore a far more antisocial thing than colour or design. If my neighbour paints their house fuscia, I needn't think about it much. If they play loud music, I have no option.

Cities are noisy places, and I think this does contribute in no small way to the general tension, and thus propensity for anger and violence, that cities are also guilty of. Traffic noise is perhaps the most pernicious, particularly since it is almost impossible to control (the infuriating 2-stroke scooter been driven past has long gone before any law-enforcement might arrive) and is also so widely accepted.

But perhaps help is on its way. Mathematicians and scientists have developed a theoretical material which would cloak an object in total silence. The implications for this are enormous. Houses that are properly sound insulated. Engine casings that would render vehicles quiet. Headgear, even, that would drop you into a calm oasis of silence amidst the noise and haste.

I wish them all the best in the trials that are to come. And want to sign up for a sheet of it to go over my back fence. Or round the boom-box in the boot of my neighbour's car.

 

Life after Life ¦ Christianity and Euthanasia ¦ Reverend Death

I finally got round to watching 'Reverend Death', Jon Ronson's documentary about George Exoo, a Unitarian minister who has performed around 100 'assisted suicides', mainly for those who have been turned down by other organisations practising legally in places/states where it is carefully controlled because they do not have terminal illnesses.

Most of the people he seemed to help were suffering depression, or from ME. The film followed him 'helping' one woman who had chronic fatigue and 'couldn't go on', though half way through the first attempt she started buttering a bagel, and announced her house-mate was due back any minute. This sent the guy packing quick-sharp: what he is doing is clearly illegal, and this was taken up in the film as the FBI chased him for extradition to Ireland to face charges of assisting a woman in Dublin to commit suicide.

It is possible to see Exoo as a very prolific serial killer akin to Harold Shipman - a British doctor who ended the lives of perhaps 215 people, most of whom were nearing the end of their lives too. Certainly, it seemed he got some sort of thrill out of 'fulfilling his calling' - which is precisely how Exoo saw things.

One thing he would do for all his clients ('because', as he said many times in almost Pythonesque comic style, 'you've not done this before') is give them a copy of 'Life After Life' - a video detailing the near-death experiences of a bunch of characters (some of whose stories didn't quite seem to hold up).

Exoo's reasoning is that 'death is a great adventure to a wonderful place'. And this is where things get interesting. Because if, as Christians or otherwise, we really believe in some after-life, then should we be critical of Exoo, or of euthenasia at all? (He claims that Jesus practised some sort of suicide, which Stanley Hauerwas refuted, before being able to come up with any proof text to show God didn't approve of suicide.)

I was watching the programme with someone I am close to, who trained as a nurse. She mentioned that in practice, in hospices and elsewhere, euthanasia is pretty common.

She then revealed that as she had watched her father lie dying of cancer in the 60's, his GP had passed her a suitable amount of morphine and told her to 'stop his pain.' She thought about it for a very long time, and then did gradually increase his dose to relieve his pain, knowing that this would kill him.

I personally think this was an incredibly brave and humane thing to do. I don't think it excuses Exoo, or his associate who does the same for a $7000 fee (Exoo takes no money) but I do think if we are to state that we believe in an after life, we need to do so in an active sense, by which I mean making sure that we fully value this life, and don't simply cheapen it as a blip before the 'real' version begins, while permitting people the option to humanely end life at an appropriate moment in a dignified manner.

"Money Having No Impact on Youth Crime" | "MPs Reject Need For Father in IVF"

Two pieces followed one-another on the radio this morning:

MPs voted last night to remove the clause that required IVF clinics to consider the need for a child to have a father and a mother - essentially opening the way for women to have the treatment without any father-figure being present in the prospective child's life.

And a recent report has found that, despite record investment, youth crime has continued to rise. "The government's record on youth crime and tackling the multiple needs of children caught up in the youth justice system is less impressive than many would have expected."

And no one suggested there might be a connection.
I am depressed.

Technorati: Crime | IVF

Saviour Sibling?

A bill regarding the use of human embryos is currently passing through parliament at the moment, and, naturally, causing a huge amount of debate. One piece on the BBC caught my ear the other morning - a Bishop was asked what he thought about the creation of so-called 'saviour siblings': human beings created for the sole purpose of saving another. And I thought, this is going to be interesting, how is a Christian going to respond to that?

He didn't go there of course, but it remains a difficult area of theology: is Jesus just a 'saviour sibling'?

Technorati: Embryo | Saviour Sibling

"If It's On Google, Why Teach It?" | Intel | Education

At a recent education conference I was at, one of the big-wigs at Intel gave a keynote about the future of technology and education. He talked about Moore's law, and some of the probable developments in educational tools, and also about the effect connectivity is having / will have on our lives.

Holding up his Smartphone, he gushed 'look at this thing! Who a couple of years ago would have thought that I would be able to have 300 emails waiting for me on a mobile device this size!'

And I thought, 'who the hell would want to have thought that?'

But it was one comment that interested me in particular. 'If it's on Google,' he said, 'why teach it?' And I just thought that displayed perhaps the poorest understanding of education, and technology's place within it, I have ever heard.

Just yesterday, as I sat reading in the evening light, the laptop shut, kids in bed after a day in the park, I pondered this.
Books and people make me a better person, I thought; the internet does not.

I think this is something to do with space and time. It is not internet access people need to be educated.
It is space and time to think and read and talk to people, and to be guided by a teacher. One cannot educate children by loading them with a smartcard pre-loaded with information. One might as well say 'If it's in the Bible, why preach it?' But that's a whole different can of worms.

Technorati: Education | Google | Intel | Smartphone

Stem Sell Research

Not content with starting a whole new business model for selling music, Radiohead have also now worked to subvert the remix business by making the stems of one of their tracks, Naked, available here.

Nice touch. Release the DNA, see what evolves.

See what people have grown, and vote, here.

Technorati: Naked

Snake on a Plane | In-Flight Mobile Use

Oh dear. The inevitable has happened: someone's come up with a way for us to use our mobiles when on the plane.

"I'M ON THE PLANE"

Next up: 'mobile free areas' on planes, and stickers telling people to keep their voices down.

I think it's sad, to be honest. Planes were one of those places where you could just relax a little, without the pressure of email and phone messages. I'm going to be posting in more detail about this another time, but a good friend sent me a fantastic article (see below) the other day by an English Professor at a US university, who is worried about how much his students are stressed by the constant demands of the infinite possibilities technology now give us. A quote in it from Thoreau came to mind as I read the news above:

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."

"I'M ON THE PLANE." Precisely.

It's 19 pages. You'll have to cut some time out to read it properly. Fewer and fewer of us are willing to do that these days, and skim the surface of learning; no time to plumb depths.

Dwelling in Possibilities.doc

Technorati: Maine | mobile | plane | Texas | Thoreau

Say no to Phorm ¦ Don't Let Your ISP Stalk You

A piece on the BBC news caught my ear yesterday. To the disgust of Tim Berners-Lee British Telecom, Virgin and my ISP Talk Talk have all said that they are going to start using Phorm in the near future. Phorm tracks your internet use, and harvests data to create a profile which these companies will then use to generate revenues from targeted advertising.

Yes, that was my reaction. No bloody way. I immediately sent off a very stroppy message to Talk Talk saying I'd immediately terminate my contract with them if they went ahead. They are hardly the most reliable people on earth anyway, and I don' t think I could trust them to manage an 'opt in' service properly. So I told them that too and said I'd sue their asses if they 'inadvertently' put me on the system.

It seems that Phorm may actually be illegal anyway, which is encouraging, though BT contest this (and claim it will 'increase security' - ffs, do they really think people are that stupid/scared?)

Whether it is or not, it is certainly against the spirit of the service. Imagine - as people have been putting it - Royal Mail opening all of your letters and reading through them, in order to send you more focused junk mail. Totally unacceptable.

We need to be very aware of these developments, and make sure we are active in resisting them. Facebook is already one of the worst offenders in terms of watered down privacy, but if ISPs are going to start, then we really are in trouble. It's all part of the business model of the internet, which in turn reflects on who we are becoming as a society: we want stuff for free, and are prepared to sell our souls to advertising to get it. As I wrote here previously, it's a model that impacts the poor most.

This isn't about 'Big Brother', it's about incrementally slightly bigger brother, who we'll suddenly one day realise has got out of control. So check your ISP. Kick up a fuss. And join BadPhorm.