For some bizarre reason I was thinking about the CU 90s Night today. It just occured to me that if the CU – or anyone else – were ever to do another 90s night, this would make the absolutely perfect poster:
(Apologies to anyone who’s seen the XKCD comics, which I admit is most of my loyal blog readers, but it’s still a fantastic cartoon).
Sam Harris is requesting people complete surveys on his website. You are requested to complete a survey (there’s more than one of them) if you are either (a) an atheist, (b) a dedicated Christian.
The reason I’m posting this here is because I think with a lot of these surveys, the only people who bother responding are (a) atheists, (b) Christians who I wouldn’t agree with on a lot of things.
I know there are a few Christians who read this blog who I do agree with on a lot of things, hopefully by filling out the surveys it will give them a more balanced view 🙂
This weekend turned out to be fairly quiet, for a change!
On Friday evening we helped out at ’21’, which went well. On Saturday we went out to a BBQ at Roy and Janette’s (friends from home group).
Afterwards we headed over to Wivenhoe to watch the new Doctor Who (“The Doctor’s Daughter”). It was a pretty good episode, but there were a few things that bothered me somewhat:
Still. Afterwards we watched Nancy and Pushing Daisies (which I’m liking more and more with each episode).
On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then headed out to Mersea: one of Phil’s colleagues was opening a gym there, and it was the “grand opening” on Sunday. After popping in, we had lunch at the Art Cafe, which was delicious. Then we headed back home and did a bit of gardening (well, Phil did at least!)
In the evening we went to “Sunday @ 7” at Fordham, where Andy Saville was talking about the Divinity of Christ. It was a really interesting talk, and most of it will be available to download from the Fordham Website shortly (unfortunately the mic gave out five minutes before the end, doh!)
After the service we came back home and watched “Wild Hogs”. I quite enjoyed it – it wasn’t the best film in the world ever, but it was quite entertaining and good fun to watch. If you’re in a video rental store of an evening and don’t know what to get, I can recommend it.
By the end of this week, I will have been to three Barbecues: one on Bank Holiday Monday, one at work today, and one tomorrow at some friends from church.
It seems like summer has arrived – or at least, the “pre-summer” we have which tends to be better than the actual summer. Still, I’m not complaining – with glorious weather like this, I’m fairly happy whatever time of year it comes at!
I always struggle a little when writing a “The Weekend” post after a bank holiday weekend: three whole days to talk about? I can barely remember what I had for breakfast this morning! (Kelloggs Fruit & Nut by the way. Just so you know).
But I’ll give it a go. On Friday evening, Rich and Martin came round to stay for the weekend. It was alumni weekend at the university, so they were over here from France and Germany respectively. So it was good to catch up with them!
We went onto campus for a drink (the SU Bar hasn’t changed much), and then they stayed on for Spin / Tonic / Fuse (whatever it was called) and we went back home.
On Saturday we went into town to do a bit of shopping and what have you. In the evening we went out to Anne-Marie’s to watch Doctor Who, Nancy and Pushing Daisies. This week’s Doctor Who was pretty good, it was quite a fitting conclusion to last week’s – and the “Are you my mummy?” line was brilliant. It had us all in fits the first time we say it (yes, we are all very sad). I’m starting to get more into Pushing Daisies as well – maybe it’s something that grows on you (like a fungus).
On Sunday we went to church in the morning, came back for lunch and then spent most of the afternoon chatting to Rich and Martin. In the evening, we had Alex and Elisa round for “Star Wars Evening” (May the 4th be with you…), and we watched A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back.
On Bank Holiday Monday we decided to go out for a picnic, so the four of us (plus Kathryn, one of Rich’s friends) walked down the Wivenhoe Trail and had lunch near Wivenhoe woods. It was an absolutely beautiful day, a perfect day for a picnic! Afterwards we headed round to Matthew and Ellie’s for a BBQ, which we’d been invited to earlier that day. It was really good fun, and rounded off a really good weekend!
Anyway, I think that’s pretty much everything.
Just a bit of site news: I have removed the “DJ Stuff” section of this website, because it was basically useless and hadn’t been updated in ages. I don’t really do DJing any more, so it was a bit useless to have the section up on the website.
In other news, I’ve been having a few problems since upgrading to Ubuntu 8. I think it might be to do with the Flash plugin, but I don’t seem to be able to view YouTube videos anymore. Not only that, but I seem to be having problems accessing certain pages on Facebook (i.e., the Inbox and Compose Message). This might be a problem with Firefox Beta 4 – I had more success with Opera, but it wasn’t 100%.
Still, the Flash plugin on Linux has always been the source of problems – I’ll look into it soon and I’m sure it will be a matter of installing the “official” Adobe Flash plugin for Linux.
Well, Ubuntu 8.04 has been released, and I’ve just upgraded to it! There was one “gotcha” during the installation, which hopefully will help people if I blog about it:
Once I’d completed the upgrade (which I did via the usual update manager), the machine rebooted and came up with the login screen. I logged in normally, but then just came up with a blank screen and stayed there. When I say “blank screen” I mean a screen with the default Ubuntu colour as the background, and the mouse pointer was working, but nothing on the screen. I couldn’t even use Ctrl + Alt + F2 to get to a terminal login. (Having said that, I can’t now so it might be something to do with my setup).
Anyway, it turns out this is a fairly easy problem to fix!
That seemed to fix the problems for me, but I will update if I encounter anything else.
Anyway, my first thoughts are that I like 8.04, although I’m not sure about the decision to include a beta version of Firefox as standard. Most of my extensions don’t work with Firefox 3 yet, so that means I’m stuck without a few extensions I like for the time being. This is my first experience with FF3 as well and it does seem quicker, but I will reserve final judgement until it actually gets a full release in a couple of months.
No, not me — I know I’m not normal! I’m talking about the program “Am I Normal” which aired on BBC2 last night. I managed to catch about the last two thirds of it. This is a brief synopsis of the programme:
Dr Tanya Byron explores what some consider the fine line between religious devotion and psychiatric disorder. She sees what happens when rational scientists try to analyse religious phenomena like Speaking in Tongues and Hearing Voices. And she considers the beliefs of faith healers who claim miracles happen, and those who believe they can cast out the malevolent spirits of the dead from within the living. (Source)
Now, although I didn’t see the entire programme, it did annoy me somewhat. The problem with these shows is the assumed atheism. The whole feeling I got from the show was, “let’s investigate these nutcases who call themselves Christians and show how unscientific and ridiculous it all is.” It was quite clear that the woman presenting the programme was highly skeptical of religion, and it came across.
The problem with these programmes, though, is not so much that they pick on Christianity – it’s more that they don’t present anyone making a good case for it. In what I saw of “Am I Normal” last night, they had a few examples of people talking about their experiences – but not one of them made anything like a case for why belief is rational. So, in other words, if someone was watching who was curious about Christianity, they’d probably be left with the feeling that we’re all a bunch of idiots with absolutely no rational grounds for belief whatsoever.
I feel particularly strong about this because of the talk we went to on Sunday night about the evidence for Jesus!
*sigh*
Ah well, if people want to find out about what Christianity actually is, there are plenty of options: Christianity Explored, for one.
The saddest part of the programme for me was the people hearing voices in their heads. She spoke to one who seemed to have a demonic voice in his head – he had been diagnosed as a schizophrenic. What saddened me was that he probably could have had help if he’d gone to a Christian counsellor. Sometimes problems of this nature are not purely mental – I believe there is a spiritual realm as well. I wish I could find a quote about this, it’s in one of my books, I might try and dig it out later!
Anyway, I think that’s enough ranting for now.
Well, it was a less “Weddingy” weekend this time round!
On Friday night we helped out at ’21’, a youth group at Fordham for those in school years 7-8 (or something like that). It went pretty well, although I was a little apprehensive because I haven’t done any youth work before at all. We’ll be helping out there every fortnight for the time being, so hopefully I’ll get more confident with it as time goes on!
On Saturday I spent the day not doing very much! – Phil was out sorting out wedding stuff with one of her work colleagues, so I stayed around and did a bit of gardening, playing the guitar etc. In the evening we went round to Anne-Marie’s and watched Doctor Who – and I must say, I rather enjoyed it! It was probably the best Helen Raynor episode to date, although there were a few things that were a little cliched: villains wanting to take over / threatening the whole world, check. People all over the planet buying the same piece of technology, check. Still, it was well paced and written with some humourous moments – I loved the “explosion” of the SatNav unit!
On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then came back home to sort out a few bits and pieces for various weddings! – it turns out that we have been invited to the wedding of one of Phil’s cousins which is happening in May (the day after Phil and Esther’s wedding!). This means that we’re now going to have three weddings in May, the total for this year being seven so far. Anyway, there wasn’t much to do – just research transport!
In the evening we went to the “firm foundations” course at Fordham, led by Andy Saville, where he was speaking about the evidence for Jesus. It was a really good talk, but unfortunately it wasn’t recorded because Andy wasn’t miked up. Still, it’s good to know that there is enough evidence for believe in Jesus to be rational, even if it isn’t coercive!
And that pretty much brings us up to date.