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27
Sep
2017
Does God lie awake at night, worrying about things?
Yes, I know -- that image immediately pictures God as a person. A person who sleeps, in a rumpled bed, tossing and turning. In other words, someone just like one of us, only more so. Psychologists call it “anthropomorphization”-- seeing others in our own image.
It’s the kind of misplaced identity that led Marc Gellman to title one of his books, “Does God Have a Big Toe?”
But basic question is not whether God lies awake at night, but whether God -- whatever God may or may not be -- worries.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: God, Nashville Statement, biblical sex, worry, worship
25
A friend required surgery recently for a lump in her breast. She got into the operating room within a week. Someone else got bumped. The surgeon shrugged: “In these circumstances, a facelift doesn’t take priority.”
My friend benefitted from a process called “triage.” Basically, it’s a system for making difficult choices. And it applies to many situations beyond medical. Even to the future of the United Nations.
In its original battlefield context, triage meant dividing injured victims into three groups:
· Those likely to recover, regardless of medical attention
· Those for whom immediate care will make a positive difference
· Those unlikely to live, regardless of what doctors can do; devoting energy to them might mean denying care to someone else who could benefit more.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Trump, triage, United Nations, NAFTA, eye for an eye
20
Almost ten years ago, in 2008, theologian and bestselling author Karen Armstrong proposed something she called a Charter for Compassion. Over 150,000 people visited a tentative Charter website. A multi-faith, multi-national group of religious thinkers and leaders met in Switzerland, to craft the Charter from suggestions that came in from more than 100 countries.
Armstrong and the Council of Conscience unveiled the Charter for Compassion on November 12, 2009, in Washington, DC.
Although I would personally like to see the Charter extended to include all forms of life -- including those we may not yet have recognized -- the Charter of Compassion as a whole feels like a worthwhile antidote to today’s heating-up climate of incessant bickering.
Tags: Charter of Compassion, Karen Armstrong
18
In its Throne Speech Friday September 8, the new NDP government of B.C. promised a referendum on electoral reform, in the autumn of 2018.
Good! Maybe….
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a similar commitment. The 2015 election, he declared, would “the last federal election conducted under the first-past-the-post system.”
It proved harder to replace than he had expected.
Until I see the exact wording of the planned NDP referendum, I can’t tell you how I would vote.
If the question asks, “Do you want to replace the present first-past-the-post voting system?” I would unhesitatingly vote “Yes.” But if the question asks, “Do you want to replace the present voting system with a proportional voting system?” I would have to vote “No.”
Tags: Voting systems, preferential ballots, transferable votes, proportional voting, Conservative Party
13
When Joan and I get tired of sex and violence on TV -- something that happens increasingly often as TV channels vie for showing more and more blood and gore -- we turn to the cable music channels.
The system runs on autopilot. The labels often fail to match the music. The album cover purports to be playing Michel LeGrand's Windmills of your Mind. But the actual tune playing is Peewee Hunt’s Twelfth Street Rag. And the little blue line that indicates progress, second by second, seems to have no connection to either the audio or the video.
Setting up a music program can’t be terribly complex. How difficult can it be, to cross reference a visual image along with filename of the music itself?
Surely an algorithm -- technically, the lines of code that run a program -- should contain some auto-correction capabilities. If the song and the visuals don't match, it should recognize that discrepancy. And fix it.
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