I Wish I Was Ern Malley

Apparently there is a New Atheism™. What’s new? The atheists hate more people. Now isn’t that nice. Not content with hating people who believe in deities, apparently they’re really ticked off with people who were content to let those people believe whatever they want. And I mean really ticked off. My favourite quote , from Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith "some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them". Yeah, it’s religion that’s the root of all evil.

Yesterday’s Australian newspaper suckered me in with a front page header “The New Atheism”. How can you have new atheism? “New atheism. Now with even less God!”? Anyway, after a brief reference to The Da Vinci Code (hardly an atheistic book) The Australian ’s article is more a review of the Pope’s new book on Jesus which, no matter what you say about the Roman Catholic Church, is more theistic than atheistic.

Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell said it was extraordinary for Mr Iemma to say he was replacing Mr Gibson with Mrs Perry because he wanted another woman in cabinet. “It suggests that the decision to bypass Paul Gibson and appoint Barbara Perry has nothing to do with the allegations surrounding Paul Gibson,” Mr O’Farrell told reporters. “That’s like saying the Easter Bunny’s got nothing to do with Easter.” The Sydney Morning Herald Uuuumm yeah … so remind me again what the Easter Bunny has to do with Easter anyway? Seriously, I’d totally forgotten about the whole Easter Bunny thing. It was’t until I picked Skye up from school and one of the mums asked her whether the Easter Bunny was coming that I remembered. Skye just looked at her blankly for a second, dismissed it as just another odd things adults said and cheerfully changed the subject. I'd much prefer to talk to the kids about Jesus dying and rising from the d...

Today was Skye’s first day at school. She’s our first child, so effectively it was the entire family's first day at school. I took the day off work to go with Skye and the rest of us to school. In some ways it was anti-climactic. I don’t know what your first day of school was like, but I remember being very excited. I can remember other starts to school years where the new kindergarten kids&madsh;and some of their parents—were crying. It was all a much bigger deal . Skye had already done orientation last year—three weeks of just the morning at school—and knew her teacher, made some friends, and so on. So really her official First Day was not much of a big deal at all. This all makes perfect sense. Starting school shouldn’be a big traumatic deal. It should be easy, and calm and fun. Just as it was for Skye today. She said she missed us though.

I heard a great talk today from Luke 1:26–45 —where the angel visits Mary to tell her she’s going to give birth to Jesus. The speaker pointed out that people have often dismissed this as impossible. And judging from her response—“How will this be, since I am a virgin?”—Mary herself thinks it a fairly unlikely event. Indeed there have been plenty of people who have dismissed Christianity completely because it’s impossible for Jesus to have been ‘born of a virgin’. However, as reproductive technology improves it can’t be too long before a virgin could conceive with the help of Science, rather than the Holy Spirit. So, the speaker’s point was, if it’s nearly possible for people, why couldn’t it be possible for God? But the real point of the story is not the virgin birth—that’s just a fact—it’s that Jesus “will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the L...

Having grown up in a family where ‘shiny-bum’ was a term of abuse applied to useless office types who never did any real work, I’m embarrassed to confess that I’ve worn a hole in my trousers. Of my suit. I’m actually embarrassed to admit that I wear a suit to work, but there it is. I have to wear a suit. I also work for an investment bank, but I’m not even going to start to talk about. So anyway the suit has a hole in it, which is OK, since this is the suit I bought about six years ago for job interviews, weddings, funerals and other suit-requiring events. But really I haven’t worn it that much. Suits are just very flimsy. And expensive, very exensive. Which is what I really hate about suits. They cost a lot to buy and wear out very quickly. The exact opposite of King Gees . This is what really ticks me off. I now have to pay 10 times as much money for clothes which last a tenth of the time. Nevermind that I’m earning 10 times the money...

Today I was at the Web Directions South conference so I've gone geek. I loaded up Flock to write this post, claimed this blog on Technorati (currently ranked 1,157,502) and started to think about tagging everything I can find with Microformats . The conference has been great with some excellent speakers on web design, Ajax, and the future of the future of the World Wide Web (”Web 2.0 is so 2005!"). It's all very exciting and it's easy to start thinking that everyone in the world is blogging stuff, loading photos to flickr and working on a Web 3.0 application. But part of the way through one of the presentations I began to wonder whether the Web can really save the world. No doubt it has changed the world in a very big way, and it's made a lot of information available, connected a lot of people and keeps a lot of us in jobs. Still it's easy to start thinking that if everyone has access to the right information then together we'd be able to solve all the w...