Following the letters page in last Wednesday's Metro and the follow-up comment on this post I’m pleased to see that the beginnings of a debate are brewing, and I intend to use this post to pick up the baton again. Unsurprisingly, I’m going to start by responding to the aforementioned comment. I apologise if my tone was deemed to be a bit sharp, but I have no hesitation in defending the point I was trying to make. According to dictionary.com , faith can be defined as “belief that is not based on proof.” As there is no proof that God does not exist, belief that God does not exist (i.e. atheism) must be faith. Now, I take your point that “as human beings we are always revising and fine tuning what we hold to be true based on the evidence to hand, what we discover and our ability to determine what is probable or improbable.” To digress slightly, that is why switching on the Large Hadron Collider is going to be something of a milestone, as it could eit...
One of the things which featured in the recent debate on this post is the idea that “religion should be about improving oneself”. This has got me thinking; ‘religion’ of course takes many forms, but in the vast majority of cases I disagree with this. To paraphrase MarkC, religion is certainly something which as a by-product might help with “improving oneself”, but however you measure self-improvement it is not the sole point, certainly not in the Judeo-Christian case. In fact, if your sole aim is to “improve yourself”, why waste your time playing around with the trappings of religion? Most religions are based around the idea of faith in God, and that, surely, is the point. Considering Christianity specifically, Jesus said “ Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself ” and so ‘religion’ should not be in danger of becoming all about wo...
Hello. Once again, I’m having to blow some cobwebs away from this Corner of the Blogosphere, but none of us has time for excuses. This time, Vodafone can take the credit for my triumphant return. It’s about all they deserve credit for, but I nonetheless feel that the wider world should enjoy this email from their customer service team, explaining why they are increasing the price of their contracts mid-term. >> Thank you for Contacting Vodafone Customer Services with regard to price increase. I understand that you are concerned about the price increase. I apologies for the inconvenience caused to you as it effected the line rental. I would like to inform you that the price increase is not in our hands. This is to be decided by the telecom companies. We have to increase the price to adjust with the competitors. The other telecom companies have already increased their prices due to inflation. The present inflation has affected many telecom companies and therefore t...
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