MetaCatholic

Justin has tagged me with a meme that seems worth doing.

Rule 1) List three reasons for your blogging.
Rule 2) List these rules.
Rule 3) Tag three others with the thread.

I confess for a moment to being thrown by rule 2, till I realised it meant include the meme in your post. (Doh!) It’s a good exercise for me right now, since I’ve spend the best part of the last week feeling totally pissed off, and my postings have been fairly sporadic as I pondered whether blogging (or most anything else) was worth bothering with. So here goes:

1. The Common Room. Fast a disappearing species in modern education the idea of a shared space to talk about whatever, listen to others talk about whatever, and somehow doing an awful lot of catching up with what others are doing in your field of interest, in cognate areas, and in their own, nothing-to-do-with yours-but-still-fascinating field of work. Those of us who get very limited opportunity to mingle with other students or with scholars can get a lot of this functionality from blogging.
2. The Pensieve.  I nick this one unashamedly from Sam. Unlike Dumbledore, it’s not that my mind is so full of thoughts that I need to put them somewhere; it’s that I’m so muddled that if I don’t write it down I spend ages going “I had an idea the other day, now what was it?”. This is especially frustrating when it seemed like a good idea. Putting it on the blog gives me a chance of finding it again, and then thinking, well, that was rubbish.
3. The Notice-board. It’s a good place to put things I want to tell others about. You know: “I found this great little video the other day: take a look at my blog.” It saves you having to remember loads of other web addresses.

So, who to tag? I tag Nick Norelli, Chris Brady and Judy Redman

written by doug

John Hobbins posts on a topic I’ve been meaning to cover for some time and not quite got round to. I too am something of a sceptic, and like him note the range of contradictory evidence around, summed up in the paradox of the rapid calving of the Antarctic ice shelf at the same time as the continental ice cap there is the thickest it has been according to known records. The sheer range of the contradictory evidence, however, makes me sceptical of any overarching theory. Most of what is said on both sides of this argument doesn’t sound to me like a full explanation. So in the interim I make the following observations.

• I find it hard to trust any climate prognosis for the next fifty years when those made for the next week are so inaccurate.
• There is a fairly large amount of money in this field of research, and scare stories tend to help shake the money loose, especially from governments and foundations.
• There is an even larger amount of money around in the businesses who resist environmental expenditure as economically damaging, and they too are paying for research.
• The global climate is such a complex system, that chaos theory should make us suspicious of simple cause and effect explanations.
• We should learn to distrust the media need for simple sound-bite stories. Those that carry the most dramatic illustrations are the ones we need to be most suspicious of. Emotional and graphic depiction easily results in the suspension of reason.
• It would be both foolish and arrogant of humans to assume that they don’t need to pay attention to their environment and accept that carelessness may lead to adverse impacts.
• Christian stewardship and the biblical vision of the human vocation as priests of creation demands that we accept the responsibility to manage the planet for the best advantage of all, and that dismissing environmental issues is as much a heresy as it is anything else.

Christians shouldn’t need scaring into caring for God’s garden.

written by doug