Advertising

Time for a break from the book reviews.

I hate adverts; I'm very glad I don't have a TV. Even so, I get bombarded by adverts for this and adverts for that through my door and by e-mail. When I had a landline phone, there too. I got to the point of hanging up whenever I heard an Indian-sounding voice at the end of the phone. Sorry, but it's true. I know there are much funnier things I could have done, but I didn't usually have the time. When I do watch TV, half the adverts seem designed specifically to annoy, to lodge the brand in my head. The kingdom of Bhutan has allegedly banned advertising, because they've twigged that trying to persuade people they want stuff they don't have and don't need actually makes people less happy. Who'd have thought it?

Who do I blame for all of this? Not the advertising companies - they are doing their job. Not the government - I guess they could regulate it, but I think they're better off keeping their hands off things than messing them up. No, I blame the population in general, because it's our fault that annoying advertising works.

Think about it. If no-one ever bought anything advertised by spam e-mail, then there would be no point in sending it. If credit card companies tried writing to people to offer them their latest card, and no-one took it up, then they wouldn't bother again. If companies tried using annoying TV adverts which lodged their brands in people's minds, and the people decided to avoid that company's products, they'd stop the annoying advertising and work on better stuff.

Consumers of the world - it's your fault. If enough of us change our habits [and ruthlessly mock those who don't ;)], we can stop annoying advertising!

Ballard & Pritchard - Practical Theology in Action

I seem to have been reading a lot lately. Possible the book I least enjoyed reading was Ballard & Pritchard - Practical Theology in Action. I have written a much longer review, which you can find by following the link. The book has a few decent ideas, but in general it sucks big time.

Ballard & Pritchard - Practical Theology in Action

The reading list said "an excellent guide to the fundamental task of theological reflection". Hmmmm...

The first thing that annoyed me about the book was the way that it read like all that social sciences stuff and educational psychology I read during my teacher training.

As a physicist, I like to understand things using models - simplified versions of reality that might or might not bear any resemblence to what is actually going on, but which produce much the same answers. I have a very arrogant and hideously unfair model of how social-sciencey types work. Here is it...

When people don't understand something properly, we (as a group) have a tendancy to come up with lots of theories. What this will actually consist of in practice is usually lots of individual people having their own flawed ideas and insisting strongly on them. Because the ideas work, at least in part (like all convincing lies), there are some things about them that are valid and true. The people who push those ideas are quite often, but not always, arrogant.

But there are other people too in the "interpretative community". Usually these are the ones who aren't quite arrogant enough to insist that their own way is the only truth, but also aren't imaginative enough to think of a better explanation and aren't discerning enough to realise that all the other ideas are partly true and partly false rather than just true in some nebulous post-modern sense. On the other hand, they are well-read enough to be able to regurgitate half a dozen contradictory views on any given topic and believe all of them. In my (arrogantly conceived) little conceptual universe, it's people like those who write books like this one.

So this book spends a large portion of its length, mainly at the beginning and end, merrily prancing through all kinds of ideas - all with something slight to commend them and all either hopelessly arrogant, stupid or naive. Some of the ideas say that it's very important to realise that some of the ideas we're sampling from all over the place might not be Christian. Sometimes they remember that, sometimes they don't, never do they apply it to their owm methodology, even when their failure to do so means they end up denying the uniqueness of Christ (2nd ed, p154).

There's also an annoying flawed-ness to many of the arguments and appallingly naive stereotyping of more conversative arguments. Here's an example (the one which ends up implicitly denying the uniqueness of Christ).

There were, not unexpectedly, some, though only one or two who took an 'exclusivist' position, claiming that Christianity was the only true religion. It was certainly an attitude found strongly in the independent evangelical congregation and, in a pragmatic, less doctrinaire way, in the black-led church. Not was it a stance... that should be lightly dismissed. Christianity had always made universal claims for Christ as the revelation of God. But it had not, until the emergence of what has been called Christendom, been absolutely exclusivist, assuming, in the West at least, no salvation outside the Church. Rather, there had always been a strong strand that had recognised truth and wisdom in religious and philosophic traditions other than its own.

That is wrong, naive and stupid. It assumes that if I recognise a non-Christian to be right on anything, I must think they're going to heaven. I recognise that a lot of physics, even the majority, has been figured out well by non-Christians using the brains that God gave them. Does that mean that I think they're somehow saved? No.

Quite often, the chapters are full of annoying waffle and comparing different wrong views, concluding that they are all correct and then summing it up in something mind-numbingly obvious that I'd have been happy starting with as an assumption.

Take, for example, the Pastoral Cycle, which is the key idea in the book. It's quite sensible actually - the idea is that if you want to know how to respond to something, you look at the situation, look at the priniciples involved, think about it, do something about it, then reflect on whether or not it worked. It's not exactly rocket science, even though rocket science is easy. (It's rocket engineering that's difficult).

Now the book does spend quite a while explaining it and applying it usefully to, for example, learning from placements at theological college. That was far and away the best bit of the book.

Personally, I think the Pastoral Cycle is incredibly obvious and what I'd have done anyway without thinking about it. But sometimes it's useful to have the obvious spelled out. It's just a shame that the rest of the book is such utter rubbish.

Chris Wright - Deuteronomy

Finished working my way through this excellent commentary on Deuteronomy yesterday. He's very good on the structure and significance of the book, very good on the understanding the passage in the light of ancient treaty structures, chiasms, etc, etc.

Also very good on why Deuteronomy is probably a unity and pretty early.

Not great on application always, but he doesn't try to be.

I found it was very useful way to read Deuteronomy.

Zadie Smith - On Beauty

One of the most difficult novels I've read in a while. Although I overlapped with Zadie Smith at university, it was almost as if we were talking different languages. So her descriptions of people near the beginning often didn't make sense in the way that I usually speak and it took a lot longer than it often does for me to empathise with some of the characters.

The basic story is about a mixed-race family living in and around a university in New England, several members of which are going through various crises.

Quite a bit of stuff to think about, and some big themes raised, often to do with what beauty is, difficulties of racial tensions and stereotyping in modern America, mid-life crises and teenage rebellion. But I wouldn't class it as a great novel...

Social Justice

It's striking that in different parts of the world, Christianity is seen as strongly associated with different political ideologies. In the US, it's usually seen as associated with right-wing republicanism. In South America, it's usually seen as associated with left-wing liberationism. In the UK, at least since WW2, it's often seen as associated with moderate socialism. Part of that of course, is to do with what the issues of the day are in those countries and what the traditions of Christianity that are dominant in those countries say on those issues.

So, in the US for example, the dominant issue often seems to be the Culture Wars – one group trying to liberalise culture in issues of homosexual rights, teaching of evolution, etc and the other side trying to make it more conservative on issues of abortion, etc. I do have things I think about that (and it is not the classic US Christian Right view), but they can with for another time. Instead, I'd like to give a quick outline on what I read the Bible as saying about social justice.

A large proportion of the Bible's teaching on this is aimed specifically at the context of Ancient Israel, which was an overwhelmingly subsistence-level agricultural Iron-Age society. But there are some good general principles.

For a start, all Israelites had land, which was seen as belonging to that family, in some sense, for ever. So they could sell the land, but it reverted back to them after a period. In essence, they had an inalienable and unsellable freehold on the land. If they went completely into debt, they could sell their land and even sell themselves into servitude, but in both cases they became free automatically (unless they ask not to!) and their land went back to their possession automatically. This meant that everyone who could work was able to work to produce their own food. It's not state handouts – it can't create a culture of dependency.

Because land was usually, but not always, held by the (male) heads of family, it was possible for people to “fall out” of the system – the widows, the fatherless, etc. There were therefore specific laws forbidding farmers from harvesting their own crops too thoroughly and giving the dispossessed the right to “clean up” after them. So even the least in society get provided with food, but need to work for it.

The whole idea of land being tied to families also means that the idea of the family is very important. So if there were elderly people who could not work, or young children, or disabled people, etc, they were cared for primarily by their family – who they're less likely to take advantage of. There wasn't any concept of “state handouts”, but there was a lot of legal support and protection for the family, to the extent that crimes “against the family” were punished very severely.

It's interesting thinking about how this applies to modern systems of social security, for example. It puts a great ideal forwards – that everyone should be supported by their own work or by that of their family. All too often, left-wing systems emphasise that “everyone should be supported” and create a culture of sponging dependency, whereas right-wing systems emphasise that it should be “by their own work” and allow people to fall through the gaps. The system in ancient Israel (about 3000 years ago) seems to avoid both dangers.

Paul McKechnie - The First Christian Centuries

I recently read Paul McKechnie - The First Christian Centuries, which is a useful and interesting introduction to the history of the Church up to AD 313, when it was finally made legal under the Emperor Constantine.

It really is one of the great (true) stories - how Jesus' followers went from a group of scared, hopelessly compromised men and a few women whom the world ignored in AD 33, after being hunted down and killed by a succession of Jewish and Roman authorities, having their religion made officially illegal in AD 62, surrounded by people who kept trying to change the message, through persecutions approaching a census in their thoroughness, to the point where Christianity eventually conquered the Roman empire. That's amazing...

Especially since the message they were proclaiming was that their leader, who was executed before the Church started, had risen from the dead and was God.

There's a bit more of a review of the book here.

By this all men will know....

One topic which has come up on here a bit (and understandably so) is how people know, or come to know, that Jesus is God. And yes, there are plenty of intellectual arguments we could go down, and I've been down some of them on here and pointed people to others.

But what is striking in the Bible is that by and large, they aren't what persuades people. Yes, there's evidence that some of them were used (Acts 9:22, 18:28). It's not what persuades most people in real life either, because at the end of the day, I don't think we're very good at debating stuff that really matters in an abstract way. We want to see it affect us and affect other people.

Here's some of what Jesus said:

By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.
John 13:35, NIV

May they [Christians] be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you [God the Father] sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
John 17:23, NIV

In other words, the key evidence for the world that Jesus came from the Father, the key evidence that God loves people, the key evidence that "Christians" are following Jesus is that we (Christians) love one another.

That's not love in a sexual sense or in a "I love New York" sense. It's love in the sense of laying oneself down for another.

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
1 John 4:10-11, NIV

Now I find this immensely challenging. So Christians, are you living in such a way that you are pointing people to Jesus? I think sometimes some of us get too complacent or too busy contending to be loving properly. Non-Christians, if you want evidence that Jesus is who he said he is, then look at the lives of Christians and at their attitude to other people.

[Yes, I accept there's an element of self-authentication - that Christians are those who love and that love in Christians is evidence for Jesus. But the point is that Jesus says there are Christians who love in a way that non-Christians, in general, do not. That's not because we're better than other people, it is because we have known God's love, which in't deserved and which transforms us.]

GCSE Results

GCSE results came out today.

My class of 18 got 7A*, 9A, 2B, which is almost exactly what my GCSE classes always seem to get (except one time, with a not especially nice class). Of those, i think 13 or 14 got the same grade on the mock as on the real thing, which just goes to show that it's the people who put the work in year round (or get the answers right year round anyway) who do well in Physics. There's the occasional person who stops working after the mock and slips a grade, and the occasional person who really works very well to get up a grade or two.

What seemed to cause most difficulty was the borderline A/A* kids making it over the grade boundary. Really needs a lot of work, that one.

And on the subject of revision, there's an excellent cartoon here.

Boris Johnson on Physics

Here's a great (and characteristically funny) article by Boris Johnson, noted classicist, buffoon and shadow minister on Physics.

Here's a quick quote:

You can strain all your faculties until your brain feels as though it is about to give birth. You can take out your panga and hack hack hack through the dense undergrowth of your stupidity until - kazam! - you get it; for one brief, shining instant, you stumble into a clearing.

The clouds part and you can see straight up to the heavens and the fundamental facts of the universe, and, in that instant, you will look on your Physics teacher with new eyes and, instead of a torturing old pedant, you will see a prophet and a man blessed, like the first great atomist, because he was able to understand the Causes of Things.

For what it's worth, I largely agree with him, but think there's still too much elitism. Yes, I think a much smaller proportion of people probably could get an A in Physics than in Media Studies for the same amount of work. But that doesn't imply that people who get a D in Media Studies are worth less than people who get an A in Physics - it just means that they're probably not as good at academic stuff and would be best applying their talents and efforts elsewhere.