Odd News 2013

05/11/2013

Such an amazing story. A man is stopped for not having an ID on a train. The cops do some research. He doesn't have a pension, a bank account, health insurance or social insurance number. He doesn't appear on any government database.

The cops search his flat, expecting to find a false bank account and maybe a few thousand euros in cash. They find over 1,400 lost priceless paintings stolen by the Nazis and thought to be destroyed by the RAF in 1944 by artists like Picasso and Matisse worth hundreds of millions of euros.

Literally worthy of a Hollywood Movie. It must have been an incredible day for the Customs agents who found all this stuff.  Again, literally the discovery of a lifetime.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24818541



25/10/2013

New Statesman writer attacks 'Operation Christmas Child'. What a miserable cow.  It's astonishing the excuses people will cook up to avoid having to do anything to help other people.  Wealthy, privileged western secularist would rather poor children go without gifts at Christmas than run the risk that people might be exposed to the story of Jesus.

It's a good thing we have secularists to protect us from this sick filth, with their brilliant insights won from information the organisation openly displays on its website and public literature. Another triumph for the print media.

http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/operation-christmas-child-exploiting-children-spread-prejudice


23/06/13

Andrew Lilico argues brilliant for something I've thought for a while but haven't got round to writing about. Pure meritocracy or 'equality of opportunity' would in actuality be a terrible, immoral system that no-one should want.  We all merely say we support it because we haven't thought about what we actually should be supporting.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/andrewlilico/100024795/meritocracy-is-an-appalling-idea-that-no-one-believes-in-even-though-everyone-claims-to/




26/05/2013

Daniel Hannan gives the best analysis of the right response to the Woolwich Murder.  Very much worth reading.  'Don't Glamourise these losers by treating them as international terrorists'.  The psychosis of a handful of agressive, alienated young males explains this and most terrorist atrocities, far better than any soul-searching about our security services, foreign policy or possible interpretations of Islam.  We need to consider the psychology that drives this tiny handful to violence when millions of others do not.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100218718/dont-glamourise-these-losers-by-treating-them-as-international-terrorists/





08/05/2013

I've been motivated by the continuing debate on Israel-Palestine to post this again. I still find it one of the best speeches given on the issue.  It's also the thing that permanently ended my lingering belief in Israel's moral superiority over the conflict.

Sir Gerald Kaufmann speaking at the time of the Gaza War in 2008.




02/05/2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/mozambique/10028738/Last-rhinos-in-Mozambique-killed-by-poachers.html

Last Rhinos in Mozambique killed by Poachers thanks to collusion by under-paid park Rangers.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.  












28/3/13

"OUR TITS ARE DEADLIER THAN YOUR STONES!!"

This is the best thing I've heard for a while.  More power to FEMEN, whoever the hell they are.

Powerful description of the hate and violence one woman faces in Tunisia for daring to post a picture of her own body on the internet. Really shows the depth of the dangerous evil in society's poisoned by Islamism across the middle east.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2300008/Naked-female-activists-topless-revolution-Tunisia-preacher-demands-nude-protester-19-stoned-death-epidemic.html










Feb 2013
Brilliant description of the development of academic study and interpretations of the crimes of the Holocaust since 1945. Especially important for those of us concerned with the importance and understanding and appreciating these events for people today.

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2013/02/ever-changing-face-holocaust-studies

Educational Hip Hop

For a long time I have been very fond of what I'd call 'Educational Hip Hop'. These videos make a particular niche of Youtube content: a charming mix of of entertainment with educational substance.

Hip Hop is better than most other musical genres for education because of its emphasis on quick speech, meaning you can get across a lot more information in the same two to three minutes than you can in a traditional song.

And the genre is happily expanding all the time. Below is a small selection of videos I've come across that span History, Theology, Economics, Energy Science & English. Please do let me know about any other quality productions so I can add them to this growing library of Hip Hop academia.

And thank you, Educational Hip Hop, for combining two of my great loves: Hip Hop and Academia.

HISTORY

Origins of World War One
The Rap Battle of Kings

King Charles II & The British Restoration

Epic Magna Carta Rap Battle
Horrible Histories

THEOLOGY

Martin Luther, His 95 Theses 

and the Protestant Reformation

ECONOMICS

Fear the Boom and Bust with F.A.Hayek and J.M.Keynes

The Fight of the Century.

Hayek & Keynes . Government Austerity vs Stimulus

Deck the Halls with Macro Follies.  

Have a Very Austrian Christmas!

ENERGY SCIENCE

The Fracking Song (with funk)

Yeah, Baby.

ENGLISH

The Antonym Rap

Word! Professor. . . .  or something.

(Obvious disclaimer: No videos are my own. All thanks to respective Youtube creators.)

What are Church Services For?

First I want to draw attention to how artificial our church services are in a way.

We gather together for an hour a week, generally, in order to worship God, carry out our liturgies, and celebrate the eucharist. And then we go out back to our lives.

But we all recognise that God's call, and particularly Christ's call in the Gospels, is a call about our whole lives. We are meant to be first transformed by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit, and then also grow in  holiness throughout our lives, not just on a Sunday.

In fact God makes it very clear that the details of our worship are irrelevant, almost worse than useless if we don't have love and faith and sincerity in our hearts generally.  

 And sometimes what we do in church every week can seem detached from how we live our lives, especially when we spend so much of our time surrounded by people who aren't Christian and don't necessarily know or understand anything about our faith.

Now, to be honest, this s already quite a common topic for Christians.  I'm sure we've all sat through at least one sermon about not just being Sunday Christians, or Christians for one hour each week.  But I'm just going to share some thoughts about it that I've found useful.

 Today in many churches, whether Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, URC the basic service can be divided into two main sections: The Liturgy of the Word, and the Liturgy of the Sacrament.  

Basically the first is based around offering prayers, reading the Bible, and discussing it in a Sermon, which is taken from the traditional Jewish Synagogue service (which was based around the Torah).

The Second is based around Eucharist, re-creating the last Supper as Jesus commanded "Do this as often as you eat and drink it in remembrance of me".

In more Protestant churches there has generally been an emphasis on the first part, preaching the Word, in more Catholic and Orthodox churches over the centuries there has been a growing emphasis on the 2nd part:  The Eucharist.

What is clear is that this basic form comes from the earliest days of the Church.  The quote below is from Justin Martyr, one of the earliest of the Church fathers, writing only 70 years or so after the writing of last of the New Testament books, and giving a description that must be familiar to any Christian today.

The two main differences is that this describes a relatively simple structure compared to some liturgies today, and that it obviously dates from a time when there was no set liturgy or text for the service. This came later, when instead of relying on the president to make up the prayers set texts were given both to give the ‘best’ prayers, to ensure that correct doctrine (Ortho-doxy in Greek) was taught and just to save the presiding person from always having to come up with something.

Fundamentally, though, this is the same structure we all use today and reflects the essential features of Christian worship and community. 

Historically what happened to the liturgy/service was a steady trend of making the central communion service more and more elaborate and mystical, with embellishments and more prayers and sections, until the time of the Reformation, when in reformation churches steps were taken to simplify it.

In some churches such as among the Quakers this led to totally abandoning formal, structured worship or liturgy, and in evangelical churches it led to a dramatically reduced form of liturgy.

In the Catholic church it led to one stable form of the Mass being adopted that endured for 500 years from the 1580's before it was simplifed slightly (and translated out of Latin) following the 2nd Vatican Council In 1960's.

What is astonishing to me though is how similar the liturgies and services still are, not just in general structure but right down to individual bits of vocabulary.  Below are selections from the current Anglican common worship, and a translation of the Latin Mass set in 1580, itself derived directly from forms of the Medieval Catholic Mass. 

 Services in Western Christianity (Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Lutheran etc) contain a very similar basic structure dating back to the medieval Catholic service containing many or all of the elements I list below, and at least many of these should be familiar to any Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Lutheran and many other western Christians. 

Eastern Orthodox churches are slightly different and date back even earlier, but contain most of these same features in a slightly less instantly recognisable form.

 Some more protestant services have a considerably more simple structure, especially if they don't necessarily involve communion.

A common evangelical approach is known affectionately as the Sandwich:  'Worship'-Prayers/testimony-Sermon done.

 Some evangelicals at least claim that they don't like liturgy, they say it's boring and fake and meaningless, but what they generally mean is they prefer a minimalistic liturgy. But the evangelical churches I've been to are definitely using a liturgy of a type even if they don't know it. Whether it's a better or worse liturgy is a very good question. And it can be just as boring and repetitive as any full Catholic-orthodox traditional liturgy.

But the evangelicals do have a good point, I don't think there is any point to church services or liturgy if we are just mumbling through the words every week, or just sitting there feeling bored, however complex or simple our liturgy may be. There is very little to be gained whatever form we use if it is not helping us grow in holiness throughout the week and the year and over our whole lives.

(Slight disclaimer: ‘catholic’ Christians such as myself who believe in the Real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist believe there is a real spiritual, blessed benefit to taking that Eucharist more or less regardless of what else we get from the service. I think what I say here is still strongly relevant in addition to that value though).

Some bits of the liturgy just don't seem to make much sense as we commonly perform them. My favourite example is the confession, which sounds a bit like this:  

 Now certainly in churches I have visited this is read out by the priest and then there is a two second delay before he pronounces God’s forgiveness for our sins. Now I don’t know about you but I need more time than that to confess my sins for the week.  In fact I’ve usually only got to about Monday lunchtime. 

And that’s not the only thing.  If we really, truly confessed our sins, in full realisation of what that meant, of Jesus’ sacrifice for us, the Love of God, and the darkness of sin then we would only ever need to confess them once and never again.  And again, I don’t know about you but I find myself coming back week after week and confessing more or less the same sins.

So what is the point of this?  Is it just bad, lazy religion?   

I think the answer is no. I do really value the liturgy and structure to our services, I really think that there is a lot that is really beautiful and valuable in these bits of liturgy that have come down to us and have been treasured by centuries of Christians.

So I want to try to think of how we can think about our liturgies and services to make them useful to our whole lives:

And my idea is basically this: Our services and liturgies offer us a model in concentrated form of what we should be trying to think about and follow for the rest of our week.  They don't do the job on their own, though they are particularly valuable as you are doing them.  But their main value is in acting as a model of spiritual discipline and the things we should be thinking about all the way through the week. In order to help us reflect on those ideas and grow in holiness.