The Hindenburg Disaster, Velcro, and Mount Rushmore are all younger than the presumptive Republican nominee.

(As are both Barack Obama’s parents – who are both dead)

www.thingsyoungerthanmccain.com

Inspired…

I peruse a few gadget blogs, as part of my sanity-saving feed-reading while at work. One of the stories that has been exciting and infuriating said bloggers for weeks now has been the whole Psystar debacle.

(For those who don’t know/aren’t interested, Psystar has been the first company to sell ‘Hackintoshes’ commercially: PC hardware pre-installed with Apple’s OS X as the operating system)

I don’t want to talk majorly on this, as its really not that interesting, but a line from Wired’s blog post today caught my attention:

“This isn’t to knock PCs – there will always be incompatibilities with such a huge array of hardware and software available. Apple makes the whole shebang, inside and out. That’s why it just works. And Psystar’s little science project is the best argument yet against Apple licensing its OS to third parties.”

Which just makes me wonder: could this whole thing be a marketing ploy by Apple?

All the Psystar issue has done is generate tons and tons of copy reinforcing why Apple’s own hardware/software combination is so good… Its amazing publicity for them; so could they have thought this up themselves?

Its May Day, it’s Fiona Parker’s birthday, and its time for elections!
If you’re in London, you can exercise your democratic rights by voting for the Mayor, the Policeman, or the Blonde Imbecile (not that I’m trying to influence you or anything).

If you live in London and don’t vote today, then you have no right to complain about whatever bad decisions the man in City Hall makes over the next 4 years. Polling stations are open from 7am – 10pm, so you really have no excuse.

Get out there and vote!

Science, it seems, can quantify anything:

“…on the subject of art and beauty, I must mention Asimov’s suggestion… of a unit for quantifying the measurement of beauty: “the millihelen.”
If the beauty of Helen of Troy was sufficient to launch a thousand ships, then one millihelen would be beauty sufficient to launch a single ship.“

[From here, via Wired.]

Taking things to their logical conclusion, one supposes a microhelen would be the beauty sufficient to launch a single sailor… perhaps in a rubber dingy…

There are 22 days to go until the London Mayoral Election (and the nationwide local council elections, if you care about such things). Why do we care? Well, we care because the Mayor of London is the most powerful job in Local Politics (arguably the second or third most powerful in the whole UK), administrating a £9bn budget affecting upwards of 25 million people. The Mayor of London’s power is by no means absolute (mitigated as it is by the London Assembly, the London Borough Councils and the UK Parliaments London Local Government Office), but the decisions made in City Hall probably have more affect on the day-to-day lives of Londoners than those made in Downing Street. Who gets this job matters.

So yesterday we got our first candidates debate, ably hosted by the BBC’s Newsnight team. Candidates’ debates are a particularly American phenomenon, and clearly a format that none of the three main candidates were comfortable with (all three stumbled several times during their opening remarks). You can watch the full thing here.

Three candidates: Ken Livingsone (Labour), the incumbent; Boris Johnson (Conservative); and Brian Paddick (Lib. Dem.). Poor old Paddick made sense when he had the opportunity to get his point across, but was completely outdone by the other candidates. Old ‘Red’ Ken did well, but was largely on the defensive, fielding accusations taken directly from the front pages of the Evening Standard, which he did his best to dismiss as the sloppy journalism that they are… (Which says something about the other two candidates: the only criticisms they could level are ones raised by a woefully biased tabloid – stories that are largely ignored as sensationalist by the mainstream media). And then there’s Boris…

OK, I’m biased. I think this guy is inexperienced, popularist with a total absence of policy, gravitas and, well, common sense. I personally think that Boris came off in the debate as someone who has no real policies, and cannot admit to the costs of even the few ideas he has managed to come up with. (Witness the many, many times he was asked to come up with a figure for the cost of commissioning ‘new’ Routemaster busses – no figure was forthcoming because, quite frankly, he has no idea). But like I said, I’m biased.

In my opinion, Boris, who is riding high in the polls at present, would be a complete disaster. His greatest level of experience is editing The Spectator, where he managed somewhere between 20 and 50 people, and had to make numerous apologies due to insensitive editorial comment. His own party have never trusted him with anything more than an appearance on comedy show ‘Have I Got News For You’. It’s not exactly the sort of experience you would want for someone running the most powerful provincial authority in the country.

Londoners, you have two votes to cast on May 1st: a 1st choice and a 2nd. Please, please don’t give Boris your 1st choice. And whichever of the 10 candidates you put 1st, please give Ken your number 2 (if not number 1).

Lets keep the blonde imbecile out of City Hall. Please!

Michael Spencer (the Internet Monk) has recently been tackling, with great sensitivity, the biggest minefield in contemporary, western Christianity: the issue of homosexuality.

There are three essays: the first is a commentary on the need for sensitive, loving communication; the second and third are responses to a specific commenter, on (loosely) whether orientation is God-given, and biblical interpretation (within this discussion).

I really, really don’t want to step into this minefield, but I do think it is worth giving credit to someone who is doing so in a careful, considered and above-all loving way… Worth a read if you are interested in this topic. Well done Michael!

UPDATE: There is plenty of interesting play in the comments, especially of the first post. Commenter Peter has the most erudite and thought-provoking response from the ‘gay’ perspective… Kevin Montgomery asks some interesting questions as well.

In a similar vein, the BBC surpass themselves (beating even the spaghetti trees in my opinion)

The Guardian runs down some of the ones it has spotted (The Sun’s is hilarious), including the above.

Well, it’s that time of year again, and it looks to me like those guys at Google have surpassed themselves…

made me laugh even more than Guinness’ inverted pint…

Oh, if only it were true! 

If it stays up, the details can be found here.

Kingdom Grace blogged the other day a very honest post about her current faith journey, and how it is taking to the very edges of organised church. A heartfelt, searching piece was quickly followed by a long (and growing) list of encouraging comments. Its really worth a read.

I’ve already ‘stuck my oar in’ in that comment stream, expressing an opinion which isn’t really shared with the other commenters. I feel a need to attempt a clearer expression of my thoughts on this subject, but I wanted to do it way from Grace’s comment stream, so that it could be more general thoughts on the subject and divorced somewhat from her current journey (although using that as my example, as it is the inspiration for posting). Its very important that in reading this you understand that I am not intending to criticise Grace or the decisions she is wrestling with at present. I have a great deal of respect for Grace, for her well reasoned and passionate writing, her openness about her faith journey, and her as a person (from what little I know of her).

This is a post about church, not a criticism of any one individuals faith journey.

So, the question is ‘is it possible to have a churchless faith’? Certainly, a lot of the regulars at Kingdom Grace seem to think it is. If you haven’t already guessed, I’m not so sure…

‘Faith deconstruction’ is kinda the ‘in thing’ at the moment; it is a journey that God seems to be taking many of us through. We look at the implicit and explicit assumptions in our understanding of what church ‘is’ and what church should ‘be’, and try to strip back to something less inculcated. We end up with loads of perfectly understandable question marks over church practices, and often with a hunger for what Grace describes as “some church thing that [is] amazingly awesome”; ie, something that is not like church as we currently experience it.

Certainly there are lots of reasons to question church as it is often expressed in all its institutional forms. Why are we meetings focused? Why is that guy (and too often it’s a guy) at the front doing everything while I just sit here? Why are we not more open and honest with each other…? In my own journey I’ve frequently got frustrated with the church community I’m part of, and with the others I see around me – some of my journey and frustrations have been played out on this blog. So I understand why people get to that place…

I also understand how difficult it can be, once you have been uprooted, to get rooted into a community again. Somehow each new community you encounter doesn’t seem to offer anything close to the value of the long-term relationships from our previous home. In short, I get it: if, like Grace, you find yourself going through a real faith deconstruction alongside leaving your long-time spiritual home, it is going to be really hard to find any spiritual community that seems to cut the mustard.

My problem is that, how ever understandable it is that you have reached that place, abandoning participating in ‘formal’ spiritual community is really a step too far: to me it’s the proverbial from the title above. Hebrews 10:25 was quoted in the comments stream, and although I agree with the commenter that we can apply this too narrowly, it, like many other biblical passages, is encouraging us to keep meeting together.

The argument implicit in there is that there is actually something beneficial to us in the process of gathering with other Christians. We are fed, we are encouraged, we are challenged, we have our rough edges worn off, by other Christians. Other Christians are, I would say, the primary mechanism by which God changes our character and builds in us the fruits of the Spirit. (And don’t we just know how much you need meekness and patience and self-control if you are in the Church for any length of time!)

I would go further, as I have in the past, by pointing out that almost every time in the New Testament the word ‘you’ is used, it is plural. We are the body of Christ, the temple of the Holy Spirit, only as a corporate identity. It is our love for each other that is what makes us known as Christians. I would go so far as to say that it is impossible to be a Christian in isolation. We can only follow Jesus when we do so as part of a community.

Now, you would probably say to me that just because you leave the organised church, it doesn’t mean that you stop ‘meeting’ with other Christians. We can be in fellowship with people who are not part of our institution. We don’t need to be part of an institution to be part of The Church.

I agree with all of that.

BUT, I have two issues with taking that route (without invalidating it as a possibility).

1) If you are not part of some form of intentional gathering (however informal) it is much much harder to ensure that you are experiencing fully honest and open communion. You have to establish fresh ground rules with each and every person you fellowship with. Yes, it can be hard to have genuine openness and accountability in a church setting, but at least with ‘formal’ groupings of Christians there are shared values, ground rules and understandings: these can (and should) make openness a more realistic possibility.

2) Without being part of some grouping that you yourself do not define, you can effectively (and easily) pick and choose who you are open with. In fact, you are very unlikely to have real fellowship with anyone you don’t like, or don’t have a great deal of similarity with, or find ‘difficult’. But like I said before, it is the difficult and the different people that God so frequently uses to shape us and to enrich us.

Like I said, babies and bathwater. There are many reasons to be tired, frustrated and really hurt by and with church. Many reasons why you might (quite legitimately) want to leave. But even our very broken, imperfect and human institutions are real tools that God uses to shape us. And without them, I think we are poorer people.

If God is calling you into a new season, then you’ve got to go with where He leads you. But if you feel that He is leading you away from any form of ‘church’, then I think you need to ask yourself some searching questions. I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just that ‘church’ even though it is broken, even though it is much need of deconstruction and reconstruction, is still something God made, and God loves.

That’s my two cents (as they say across the pond). I hope it has come across sensitively enough; if not I apologise.

God bless

a