Predictions for 2012

Presented without undue ceremony, here are my predictions for 2012. I don’t claim any great expertise in the realms of prognostication, politics or pop-culture, so they may be utter nonsense. But you can always check back in 12 months to see how I did.

Book Review: The Qur’an

The Qur’an seems to fascinate people. For Muslims, it is the supreme source of knowledge and wisdom. For Bill Maher it is a “hate-filled holy book“. Given the current climate, there are presumably quite a few people who regard it with suspicion if not outright hostility. So, naturally, it seemed like it would be a good idea to read it.

Unreasonable Faith

William Lane Craig is a Christian philosopher. Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist who has said some unkind things about God. The former, on a speaking tour of England challenged the latter to a debate on the subject of his book “The God Delusion”. The latter, observing that the former had previously made statements apparently endorsing genocide as long as God said it was OK, decided not to take up the offer. The former, presumably having expected this rebuff, went ahead anyway, promoting the event via advertisements on the side of Oxford buses beginning “There’s probably no Dawkins…” in the style of the atheist “no God” campaign. So, despite the fact that the event at the Sheldonian Theatre was a whole £10, I went along.

Obituaries I will read with pleasure

I used to wonder who I would actually kill, given the chance.

That probably sounds a little unhinged, so I suppose I’d better qualify it. The gedankenexperiment went something like this – supposing I was diagnosed with some particularly fatal ailment such that I had, say, 3 months to live, and I was prepared to take an ethical bullet for mankind by devoting my remaining time and modest financial resources by seeking out and destroying the individual who had done the most damage to the world over the course of his / her life, who would it be?

My epic MP3 conversion quest – part 3: Mr T ate my metadata

If you’re new to this craziness, start by reading part 1. If that doesn’t leave you feeling faintly nauseous, try part 2. If you’re still a glutton for punishment, continue and at least you’ll have some idea what’s going on.

After a brief flurry of activity in which I actually ripped all of the CDs I had at the time into WAVs, the project languished while I tried to figure out a way of getting all of the XML files into shape. The thing which restarted my interest in the project, and gave me a way out of the murky darkness was Subversion.

Having no future – it’s a terrible thing

A few random thoughts and musings about the recent (at the time of writing, ongoing) riots. They’re not extensively researched and are based on my impression about what’s going on from a feed consisting primarily of the Guardian website, Twitter and Facebook. As always with these things, I could be wrong.

Book Review: The Bible

I thought it would be educational to read the Bible, a process which took roughly two months of train journeys to and from work. There were a number of motivations for this:

1. To have a better grasp of its contents.
2. To recognise figures of speech and literary allusions which have a Biblical origin.
3. To form my own understanding of God.
4. To try to understand what Christians see in it.

I shall tackle these in order.

Book Review: American Taliban

American politics is fascinating in the same way a car-crash, invasive medical procedure or messy celebrity divorce is fascinating. You know it’s wrong to stare, but you crave every detail of the whole sorry business so you gawp dumbly at it, unable to take it all in.

Broadly speaking, there are two political parties in the States – the Republicans and the Democrats. When I was younger, my mental picture of the world had these mapped nicely to English equivalents – the Republicans were Conservatives (pro-business, pro-rich-people) and the Democrats were Labour (pro-social-equality, pro-poor-people in the sense of wanting to help them). A nice simple picture, marred by two facts, namely that the colours were the wrong way round (Republicans = red, Democrats = blue), and if it ever had any truth at all (doubtful) this mapping now is entirely wrong. A more accurate picture would have the Democrats as Conservatives (perhaps on the left of the party) and the Republicans – well, they’re just off the scale.

Rescuing Jesus from the Christians

Following on from my previous post, this was my dad’s essay on the subject of “Rescuing Jesus from the Christians”. One of these days I’ll explain to him how he can publish things on his own blog, but until then it will live as a guest post on this one. In my objective assessment of the two rival posts, I think I score higher for “use of profanity” but my dad wins on “actually knowing what he’s talking about”. Enjoy.

Reclaiming Jesus from the Christians

Recently, my dad advised me to read Jesus & Philosophy by Don Cupitt. As a dutiful son I did, after which I suggested (with tongue slightly in cheek) that it would be a worthwhile project to try to reclaim Jesus from the Christians, who seem to have done a pretty good job of sabotaging his message and generally making a hash of things. Amused by this notion, he suggested that we should both write a 500ish word essay on the subject. This is what I came up with – probably quite a few rough edges (I put it together over several train journeys and don’t want to spend huge amounts of time editing it), and you really should read the book to get some of the background, but here it is anyway…