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| I find that, as I discuss issues with people, I often find myself expressing opinions I've never really thought about before, often (I hope) in a fairly cogent way - as if I had held them for years.
I don't think this is because I make up stuff. I think rather it's because the different views of others often provide a lens for me to look at my own ideas in a different way - which is generally really helpful, because having looked at it in that way I can then express my views in a form that makes sense, and is relevant, to the people I'm talking to. I don't end up saying stuff I would previously have disagreed with, I end up saying stuff which, had I heard it earlier in my life, I would have agreed with and thought to be illuminating. Because I have, in the interval, been illuminated.
I don't know why I bothered writing this, I can't imagine anyone else will care. But it's a cool thing which happens, and I think pretty often God has a hand in it. Certainly it happens most often when I'm discussing him with people. :)
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| Every so often, I get the feeling: Meaningless, meaningless, utterly meaningless: everything is meaningless!
I sit in my room and look out the window, and ponder: when I die, I will have achieved nothing, done nothing, and will look back with my dying gasp and regret my birth. Happier is the one living than the one dead, or perhaps the other way around depending on how your life is, but happier than both is the one who has never been born.
And this makes sense. The scary thing about it is, it does make sense. One day I will die; one day, all the actual events and efforts that I have put my life into will have withered and died. My wife, if I ever get one, will die, our children will die; the memory of the love we shared will collapse like an ash sculpture in the wind. All the people I convert, if I convert any, or indeed affect positively in any way... they'll all die too, and when they die they will rot. Or burn. People talk about transient beauty being worthwhile just for the moment of perfection. That's just rubbish. Objectively speaking, it's rubbish. That may be a subjective statement, but in a sense I believe it.
And yet... it's not true! It's not true! Although I look out my window and feel gloomy, I have explanations for that, and better, I can go and read my Bible and discover that people have been feeling the same for many thousands of years, and have wrestled with it and dealt with it, and come out the other end with a sense of purpose so razor-sharp that whole nations have been made, and broken, and bought....
I met a man named Mark Ashton today. He will die in a few months of a terminal illness. I will not cheapen it by saying that 'never in my life have a met a man who...' whatever. But I was struck by his cheerfulness, by his own admission that these last months have been one of the most amazing times of his life - but most of all by his interest in others, his attention to conversation largely nothing to do with himself. This man has a purpose in his life.
God bless you, especially if your life seems meaningless. It isn't.
Peter.
PS. For the record, I am not a Christian because I think that it provides purpose. I am a Christian for completely separate reasons - the essential one being that I believe it to be true. The meaningfulness of life that springs from it is merely one of the reasons why I love it, not why I adhere to it.
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| In 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height, a Soviet submarine strayed too close to Kennedy's so-called 'quarantine line'. US destroyers started sending down depth charges in an attempt to get the submarine to surface.
The Kremlin sent the go-ahead for the use of nuclear-tipped torpedos. For this to happen, the captain of the ship and two of his suborninates (Political Advisor and Vice-Captain) had to unanimously agree to fire the missiles. The captain wanted to. Versions differ on the decision of the political advisor, but are definite that the Vice-Captain, Vasily Arkhipov, blocked the decision.
Had nuclear-tipped torpedos brought down a U.S. destroyer, nuclear war would have been incredibly likely.
Kudos to Arkhipov, for saving all our lives - in my case, before it even started.
Thanks also to Noam Chomsky's book Interventions for drawing my attention to this.
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| So I live in Mozambique.
They do not have capital punishment there. Officially, that is. On the other hand, it's a country with an incredibly high rate of people dying in prison. This is not because of poor prison conditions. This is because they are killed by the guards.
Why?
Well, it's not just brutality. 99% of the population is dirt-poor. Subsistence farmers. So they'll save up for not just weeks but months, or over a year, to get something like a radio, a bicycle, or a mobile phone. If they get a mobile phone, they won't have a charger, or even electricity in their home; they'll go round to the house of somebody who does have these commodities, and pay a bit to charge it up. Or if they're lucky enough to have a friend with such things, they might get it for free. That gives you some impression, perhaps, of their level of wealth.
Now imagine that you have got such a thing - a bicycle, say - and somebody steals it. Perhaps you can understand that this sort of thing breeds a hatred of thieves which is totally unparalleled in the western world. We think we hate thieves; but they, if they catch thieves, will pretty often kill them personally. It's no joke. And the society is such that a thief deserves no mercy; even if he's never stolen from you, by being a thief he deserves to die. Hence the death rate in the prisons - the guards are acting in the same way as the rest of the people would, and with their full support. This, of course, attracts periodic cries of outrage from human rights groups. Not surprisingly, nobody really cares.
There is, however, one rather surprising outcome of all this, and that is that the prisoners have rather more freedom than they would in many western countries. Because in some areas the prisons are so crowded, and nobody has enough money to feed them all, some clever chappy came up with the idea of having them feed themselves. So in some areas the prisoners spend the entire time outside, growing their own food. This has the dual advantage of being cheap, and also keeping the prisoners out of their intensely cramped cells at all times except for sleeping.
Moreover they can have projects like having a bunch of say 10 or 12 prisoners, watched by a single guard, cutting roadside grass (we've seen this several times while driving around). They cut it with katanas (better known in English as machetes). Can you imagine in England or the US seeing such a poorly guarded bunch of prisoners, armed with huge knives - either for their own farming or for community service? Of course not.
The reason it's safe in Mozambique is that all the prisoners know that if they escape, especially if there's violence involved, and then are recaptured... they will definitely die.
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| So in a moment of boredom I was reading Wikipedia, and came across the concept of 'vocal fry'. Ever heard of this? Apparently, there are four ranges of the human voice; modal (this is the one we normally talk and sing in, in fact we do pretty much everything in this voice), falsetto (you know what that means), whistle (above falsetto, generally only kids and high-pitched women can do it) and vocal fry.
Vocal fry is the coolest. It involves bubbling. | | |
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