It may be a spectacularly worthless non-story, but there’s one irony at the heart of it I would like to comment on. The Telegraph “journalist” (who deserves the scare quotes for writing this rubbish) seems to expect his readership to assume both that Richard Dawkins should be judged by his ancestor’s behaviour, and that his ancestor is a particularly noxious example of morality such that his bare existence renders all of Dawkins’ thought immoral by association.

In doing so, he manages two things. He judges the behaviour of the past by the morality of the present, and he assumes that what a Dawkins once did and believed in the past irredeemably contaminates what a Dawkins does in the present.

This is, of course, laughable and lamentable in equal measure.

It also has a remarkable amount in common with how Dawkins treats much of Christian faith and history. Everything done in the past should be judged by the standards of the present, and it is irredeemably contaminated by Inquisition and Crusade.

It’s a silly argument when he uses it, and it’s still a silly argument when it’s used against him.

Now, if only he could see the irony …

On the other hand, in my own writing, even after extensive editing and proof-reading, I find places where I think “I could have said that better (or more clearly)”. In some of my first drafts (okay, second and third as well) there are places where I have been challenged and rewritten – not always successfully – for greater clarity.

In a great many places, I may change something because I prefer to avoid repetition, or because I rather like a phrase which develops or limits a degree of assonance or alliteration.

Sometimes I fail to see where my communication needs semantic improvement, and sometimes my stylistic improvements have no semantic intent.

It seems to me that such experiences are common to anyone who tries to communicate, in speech or writing.

So why does so much commentary attribute so much intentionality to the smallest detail, and seek to resolve a theology out of every ambiguity? Is it a scholarly language game, or the academic afterlife of divine inspiration? Either way, it scarcely seems to be reading the Bible like any other book.

Reading the prologue to John almost gave a sense that the compilers were making sure no-one was having any withdrawal symptoms from Christmas. However with a first reading from Proverbs 8 (1,22-31) it did give a chance to focus on a different aspect of the passage.

One of the distinctive differences between the KJV and modern translations is the choice made for John 1:9

That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

as opposed to (typically) the NRSV

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

Either is possible. The former translation, however, emphasises that the Word / Light plays a universal role in what one might call natural revelation (which sounds to minds embedded in traditional theological disputes a little oxymoronic). A great deal of the same idea would seem to underpin much Wisdom literature including that in the Bible.

Truth is truth, and wisdom, wisdom, and ultimately wherever they are found both derive from the One who is only wise, only true. Proverbs, after all, seems quite happy to incorporate the earlier work of Egyptian sages – the Instruction of Amenemope – as part of the wisdom of God. (One suspects the author of the Exodus plague narrative would have disagreed.)

There is no clear spelling out exactly how the writer of the Fourth Gospel sees the Word as the Light that enlightens everyone. Some early interpretations reflected on a Stoic idea of a spark of the word seeded in every soul, other later interpreters saw the capacity to reason as fundamental to what it meant to be in the image of God. I think we need both to get some of the thrust of that idea back, and develop it again.

We humans are people who see patterns in the world, patterns that seem both reasonable in themselves, and able to be explored rationally. It is possible to argue (I think) for one of three positions.

1. Those patterns are deceptive and subjective, read into the universe and history by human observers as they choose, but there is no real rationality out there to be investigated. Hardly anyone – and certainly no scientist – behaves as if that were the case.
2. Those patterns reveal that the universe is ordered according to mathematical ratios and scientific principles in ways which make it entirely open to rational investigation, but there is no actual reason the universe is reasonable. The ordered, proportioned and investigable universe is the result of a purely accidental, irrational and random chance. Such a view seems not only to make science pointless except in utilitarian ways, but it seems, as it were, an act of blind un-faith.
3. Those patterns reveal a fit between the reasoning investigator of the creation and the rational nature of what is being investigated that make design, purpose and intentionality a more congruent understanding of the patterned universe. Some sort of Creative Reason behind the universe seems a more reasonable explanation both of the human capacity for reason, and the susceptibility of the universe to rational investigation.

I think we Christians need to become better known as valuers of reason, people who treasure the book of the world as well as that of the word, people who search out truth convinced that all truth is one and indivisibly God’s truth. It seems to me that reason is on God’s side.

The best reason to choose one operating system rather than the other is if you need or wish to run a particular application that is only available on one or the other platform. Examples might be Keynote or Final Cut Pro on OSX, or OneNote or HitFilm on Windows. Most software, however, has an equivalent, if not an equal, on the other platform.

The other really good reason, at least to choose Windows over OSX, is budget. Macs are, if you set the OS aside, high end PCs. Broadly speaking, a Windows machine specced similarly to a Mac will cost a similarly high price. If you can’t afford (and don’t need) a high-end machine, then Windows is a very sensible choice.

It is also reasonable to say that you are more used to or prefer to use (and I suspect these have a rather large overlap) one system to the other. This may be a mix of personality, style and objective features. For example, I think Windows 7 use of jump lists is a great feature I wish OSX had. On the other hand, one of the great Mac strengths (as I see it) is the way keyboard shortcuts for a range of accented and special characters work system-wide. (It is also true to say that I love Apple style as much as I object to Apple constraints on my choices, such as a matte screen for no additional cost.)

However, most of the commonly used applications are available for both platforms. In my view, the main MS Office programmes are rather better in their Windows 2010 version than their Mac 2011 version. On the other hand, the Adobe Creative Suite software (especially for character shortcuts) still works more naturally as OSX software than Windows.

(I add, here, that I am deliberately ignoring Linux. I still regard it as a geek alternative. Until programmes such as Office or Creative Suite are ported to it, it will remain an interesting, but largely irrelevant, sideline.)

Overall, it is Swingdows and RoundaMacs. So ignore the fanboys, and ask yourself three questions in order of importance.

1. Is there any application I really need to use that only works on one platform?
2. Does my budget constrain me to Windows?
3. Does my personality, experience, or typical usage make one OS a more natural fit than the other?

After that, everything else is advertising, mentality or image.

But the thing is, I’m not sure how much this matters. If it’s the case that this fragment / portion is of sufficiently significant length for us to be certain it’s Mark’s gospel, and can be pushed back into the first century, then does it really do anything more except mildly strengthen our confidence in the discipline of textual criticism or limit some of the wilder fringes of speculation?

It’s also the case that this basic approach of fidelity to the source material is a regular issue in the reviewing (and publicizing) of Jesus films or TV programmes. We had some good examples the Christmas before last with The Nativity.

What I found myself wondering, however, as I read the Den of Geek piece on Holmes, was that this style of review or critique is rare in discussing the different gospels, yet might be quite interesting and even fruitful. What would it be like to discuss (on the Farrer / Goulder / Goodacre hypothesis) Luke’s Gospel as a remake of Matthew, or on almost every theory Matthew as a remake of Mark, or perhaps John as a remake of Mark or (decidedly more controversially) as a remake of Luke.

Of course, the fact that when it comes to the gospels dependency is not entirely clear or resting on a single source makes some difference. Nonetheless, perhaps this kind of imaginative critical approach might even shed some light on the plausibility of such hypotheses. Or it may simply be a rather intriguing jeu d’esprit.

I wonder.

First, I find I easily get suspicious when people approach the morality of specific policy proposals with emotive rhetoric about “the children”. It’s a bit like following a car with a “Baby on Board” sticker. What’s the opposite? There are no babies in this car, so you can drive as carelessly as you want? Waving child poverty around indiscriminately is not an argument.

It seems to me, quite frankly, that £26,000 after tax – which is the effective limit of the cap, is quite a high income. Certainly it’s considerably higher than mine, although my taxes will have to help cover it. That in itself is not a good argument, but we need to remember that it’s not just higher than mine, but that £500 a week is more than the gross average weekly earnings. That does, I think, raise questions which are both ethical and practical about the relationship between those in work and those out of work, and how the state plays a part in building social co-operation rather than antagonism.

Behind some of the opposition to the benefit cap is an expressed anxiety about the children’s needs. It is probably fair to say that there is a certain congruence between many verses in scripture (though others point in a different direction) and the Marxist slogan “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. Something like that appears to lie behind what some bishops are saying.

There are problems, however, in applying that in a society that has long since confused “want” and “need”. Even before the cap, there would seem to be a significant number of households where the children’s disadvantage has more to do with what the money is spent on than with the amount of money that is made available. It is highly doubtful there can be a moral redistribution of wealth in a society that sees no moral problems with spending money it does not have, whether at the governmental, corporate, family or individual level. In that sense, many families are caught as much in a morality trap as a poverty one, where everyone thinks they should have a right to what they desire.

That concern about morality should, however, be taken further. On the whole, the Christian tradition has seen work as a significant part of human existence, ideally directed to good stewardship of the material world, and towards creativity, but also recognised as sometimes just hard labour. Certainly it has encouraged a sense of taking responsibility not only for one’s own actions, but for the care of the neighbour.

Under either of those broad themes, the current situation which actively encourages people not to work by making them worse off, or to see themselves only as recipients of an impersonal state care that somehow becomes a default right, is itself an immoral one.

That may well be matched by the immorality of the unfettered market making job cuts in pursuit of higher profits, rather than sustaining more in work at the cost of reduced but still adequate profits. There are Christian critiques of the market to be made, not least for creating the concept of “human resources”, which is a dehumanising a concept as any invented and profoundly destructive of the dignity of the human person as steward of God’s resources. People are not merely material from which product and profit may be made.

Unfortunately, the benefit trap is at least as dehumanising as the unbridled market, and the welfare state in its totalising current shape, shares the same debased image of the person, shelving them in an warehouse of the unemployable, with a bribe sufficient to stop them resisting their own marginalization from society as an unproductive resource. That, I think, is a far worse moral ill to inflict on children than any benefit cap aimed at bringing such collusion between family and state to an end.

A good animation of a brilliant oldie but goldie.

Sadly it has a little too much truth about it.

There was a growing tendency within the theory world to claim that people had misunderstood what [Derrida] said, or had taken it literally, or in a naïve or simplistic way, and this complaint was constantly echoed by his supporters. When people argued that he was wrong about something, the response was always that that wasn’t what he had said, or what he had meant.

Given the heart of Derrida’s work, the idea that he can be defended by resorting to authorial intention to determine the meaning of his texts offers a strong denial of his project, and precisely by those claiming to defend him.

Now there’s irony for you!