Monday, December 09, 2019

A vote for the Conservatives

So what's the Conservative message at the start of this election week?
This is basically a dogwhistle for xenophobic voters. The message is, vote for me, vote for Brexit, to get rid of foreigners.
But let's dig down a little and see what that means.
The other side of the coin is that UK migrants and visitors have been able to "treat the EU as if it's part of their own country". If you've ever had ...
a job in the EU,
or a holiday in Spain or Portugal or France or Croatia or Malta or Italy or Poland or the Netherlands
or done a booze cruise,
or gone to a football match abroad,
or had or stayed in a second home abroad
or even made a longhaul flight connection in the EU,
you've been "treating the EU as if it's part of your own country." EU visitors get one country. In return we get 30.
The third side of the coin is, I know those EU migrants. They are people I like and value as people. They are Ana, and Ewelina, and Jose, and Katarzyna, and Stefania, and Marina, and Rubio, and Aleksandra, and Aleksandra, and Jana, and Lluis, Heidi, Aneta, Vibeke and Henrik. They are work colleagues, the people in the supermarket and the cafe, people I play Pokemon with, people in church. The list could go on, sorry if I've missed you out, friends. What is exactly the problem with them treating the UK as if it's part of their own country? If they came to my house, I'd be happy with them treating my house as if it's part of their own house.
And given that Sharon and Rob, Diane and Andrew, Alan and Jane, Alan and Jackie have made other countries their home because of freedom of movement - it's been a two way process - I just don't see what the problem is.
Johnson, in these words, is saying because of this vague, xenophobic idea that "EU migrants feel at home here", as though that's a bad thing, all this should end.
If you vote for the tories, you're voting to end this.
You're voting to get rid of my friends and colleagues.
Deliberately. That's what Johnson is telling you it's for.
You're voting to take their freedom away.
And you're voting to take my freedom away.
And you're voting to take your own freedom away.

Friday, May 24, 2019

Grace

I want to talk a bit about grace, because I think a lot of the time I don't really get it. From a Christian point of view, we have plenty of songs which major on grace ("Amazing grace", "Wonderful grace", "Grace, grace, grace", "By grace alone somehow I stand"), we have churches (Grace Baptist, Grace Community ... and so on), and of course as believers in the Protestant tradition, we follow Luther and the reformers and the apostle Paul in asserting that we are saved by grace alone. But I think we end up a bit muddled after that. What does it actually mean? What am I supposed to do with it? How should I live as a result? I think a lot of that may be because when we think about it, we tend to focus on ourselves. What happens when instead we start from God?

What does grace mean to the giver?

I guess the point about grace is that it starts from love. This is something that is open to us to experience as human beings. The trouble is, the language of love is blurred today; we tend to think of it as being transactional - you do something for me, I do something for you. This idea of relationships is described in Ecclesiastes - not in an approving way, but as part of what life looks like "under the sun" - if you take God out of the equation. "Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken." As though the whole point of relationships is to make you stronger, a kind of evolutionary strategy.

But that's not what love is. Love makes you weaker.  Or perhaps slightly more accurately, love has a cost. You give yourself for the other person. For example, parents sacrifice their comfort, wealth, and sleep to care for children. For all the jokes about what we expect our children to do when we need to be cared for, both the parents and the children know that there's nothing the child is ever going to be able to do which will make up for what their parents have done for them. Other relationships are like that as well - although it may be the case that both parties in a relationship sacrifice themselves within it.

I think that's how we need to understand how God is towards us. He created us, he loves us - not in a way that he is ever going to get anything back from. In fact, in the same way that there's nothing a child can really do to give anything back to their parents, there is absolutely nothing we can give back to God - because it was he who gave it to us in the first place. There's more - because we have "sinned", rebelled against God, he actually needs to come and rescue us. The price of this, in Christian terms, is massive - God, in the person of Jesus, comes and gives up his life to save us from the consequences of our sin. In the same way that a parent would do anything, give anything for their children, or a lover would do anything, give anything for his or her beloved, God has done everything and given everything to save us.

But the significant question is, why? What does he get out of it? Is it some kind of power trip to get people to worship him? Well, if you are the creator of the universe and so on, you don't need to surrender yourself to achieve this. In the same way as the pagan kings in the Bible could simply pass a law commanding everyone to bow down to them, and couple it with a death sentence for those people who didn't, there's no reason that God could not have done that. "Worship me - and if you don't, you'll face my judgement." If you accept that he is the creator of the universe, then it's hard to say that this is an unreasonable position to take.

But he doesn't.

Instead he gives us everything, eventually even himself. He knows that as he gives us this, we have done nothing to deserve it, and there's nothing we can do to repay it. So why does he? The answer is, because he loves us. "I know you don't deserve it. I know you can't repay it. But I love you - so I am pouring this out upon you..."

How does one react to this? Remember, nothing you can give back will ever repay what you have been given - and that's not what God expects - in the same way that we don't tot up the debt our children have for us and present them with a bill, and we don't keep a kind of ledger of the good things and bad things that our lover does for us if we truly love them - we just give, because it's what we want to do. What do you want from someone you have poured out your grace on, out of love? I would suggest that you just want them to value it, to be thankful for it, to recognise it. You want don't want them to do anything, you just want to know that they understand what you have done for them, and value it.

Now, what happens if you don't value what someone has done for you? You can imagine a situation where children are ungrateful for what their parents have done - they don't appreciate it, or mock it, or whatever. Or no matter what a lover does, his or her beloved is indifferent and unmoved by it. Eventually, the heart of the person pouring out their grace will be broken, they will stop giving. Eventually, in a sense, this also becomes an act of grace - the final one - the child does not want the embarrassment of their parents showing their love; the way the lover pours out grace on the beloved when the beloved is indifferent is just awkward. Better in those circumstances for the grace to cease, to allow distance between the two parties. The parent, the lover has not stopped loving, but unrequited love ultimately goes nowhere. 

So what should grace mean to us?

I suppose we need to grasp the nature and meaning of grace, in the first place. God's grace to us means that there is nothing we can give back - for our life, for our salvation. Anything we have to offer God is what he has already given us - it's his already. And he's not looking for you to "give anything back" to him. Or "give anything" to him at all. He simply wants you to understand and value what he's given you.

Again, it helps to think about this in terms of human relationships. What would the beloved do if the lover pours out grace upon them? They would simply love back. They would recognise how much they have been given, and be simply devoted in return. They don't need to do anything - the lover doesn't give a list of rules that need to be obeyed in return for their love - because they are simply pouring out their love. But even so, it is easy to see that there are ways of behaving in the light of that love which aren't an appropriate response to it. Parents don't approach their relationship with their children as a kind of quid pro quo thing - but everybody knows how awkward it is to see children who are ungrateful, who take what their parents give them for granted.

This imagery does exist in the Bible in more concrete form (eg. the book of Hosea) as well as in discussion about salvation by grace, and what the law means for people who have been saved. It's wrestled out in the New Testament as well - how are we supposed to live? What are we supposed to do? We are not called to live under the law, but that doesn't mean that what we do doesn't matter. There is a picture of what it is like when it goes wrong in both brothers in the story of the Prodigal Son - the younger brother takes for granted what his father has done for him - but the older brother is clearly resentful of his father as well - the same grace has been poured out on both of them, but the older brother talks about the fact that he has been "slaving" for him and "never disobeyed [his] orders" - this isn't the language of someone responding to love.

The image of the older brother was arguably the main point of the parable, addressed to the target audience - the Pharisees, who resented the fact that Jesus was drawing "sinners" back to God. Their lives had been based on keeping the rules, on proving they were good enough for God. But that was not how God had ever brought people to himself - he had always given salvation to his people. It's hard for those of us from a religious background to hold onto the fact that it's nothing that we have done that saves us - we tend to think, like the Pharisees, that we are pretty good - and lose sight of the fact that God has simply poured out his grace upon us because he loves us, even though there was nothing we could give to him. That's what we need to be holding onto.

This post is just musing; if there are theological errors, they are all mine.


Saturday, May 04, 2019

Local election results

The leaderships of both the Conservatives and the Labour Party have reportedly said that the message from the local elections is that "they should get on and deliver Brexit".

What actually happened in the local elections is that Brexit supporting parties (UKIP, Conservative, Labour) all lost seats, and Brexit opposing parties (Liberal, Green) gained seats. There was also a turning away from national parties towards local groups. So there is disillusion with national/international politics - but to describe this vote as an endorsement of the movement towards Brexit takes a level of pigheadedness and confirmation bias that in any merely safety-critical role would probably be fatal. The parody website, Newsthump is doing a better job than the main news outlets of cutting through the cant on this.

In the European elections, the picture will be different. That's because at the European elections, the groups who don't actually care about local politics but which just want out of the EU will come out to play (Brexit party) and the voters who don't actually care about local politics but which just want out of the EU will come out to vote. The main parties will still be hammered, but it won't look as unequivocally anti-Brexit as the local elections did.

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Representative democracy?

In the last 24 hours, a single petition has attracted 700,000 signatures, and is now nudging a million total signatures. That's 1% of the total population in 24 hours, and say 2% of the voting population in total. The petition is very, very simple. "Revoke Article 50" - that is, stop the UK withdrawal from the EU.

The people who digitally sign the petition basically know that it's not going to change anything - the deal with government petitions is that over 100,000 signatures will mean that a petition will be "considered" for debate in parliament; that's the best that's on offer - but since parliament is largely preoccupied by the issue of Brexit anyway, the likelihood of this specific item receiving separate consideration is slim. The same goes, I imagine, for the people who are planning to march in London on Saturday in support of a new referendum. At this stage, it's unlikely to change anything - but people want the government to know that this is not happening in their name.

The justification for signing the petition is that for large numbers of people, their belief that the simplest and best way out of this mess is just to stop it, is not being articulated. The views of the 17.4 million people who voted to leave in the referendum are talked about continually - and the non-binding referendum has become binding, and the fact that we were told that arrangements for leaving would be agreed in advance has been ignored. If 2% of MPs expressed this view, 12 of them would have stood up in parliament and asked for the process to stop in the last few messy weeks. If even one person had stood up and articulated it, it might have been enough raising of a flag to get it on the table. But even the europhile LibDems instead have focussed on the expensive and dubious option of a second referendum. Revoking Article 50 is clearly not a less-than-1% option - but you wouldn't know that given the failure of any politicians to contemplate it.

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Project Fear

The funny thing about all the "project fear" statements is that people use it almost like being told something is bad makes the statement wrong in itself. "Bad effects of brexit? Project fear! Climate change? Project fear! Smoking causes cancer? Project fear! Not wearing a seat belt increases risk in road accidents? Project fear!" It's like invoking Hitler - "stop the argument, this is the trump card."

Oh, and another funny thing ... picking isolated statistics as a supposed refutation of project fear ... "Look at our employment rate! Project fear is wrong about Brexit. Look at the nice weather in Wales! Project fear is wrong about climate change. My uncle smoked for eighty years and didn't get cancer! Project fear is wrong about smoking. I know someone who knows someone who in an accident was thrown clear of a car and walked away without a scratch, when the car exploded and killed everyone else! Project fear is wrong about seatbelts."

Basically, I am sceptical that anybody who says "project fear" about anything is capable of serious critical thought. It's an anti-argument. But then since "An argument that feels right to me and fits what I want to believe must be as true for me as your argument is true for you", I guess that's what we should expect in a postmodern era.

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Making LaTeX work

If you are a "normal" person, you've probably never heard of LaTeX (pronounced "lay-tech"). It's a text processing system in which, rather than WYSIWYG, you mark up your code as you write it, and then compile it - typically into a PDF. The appearance can be startlingly attractive - Donald Knuth, who is basically one of the people who invented computer science, apparently said that TeX, which underlies it, was intended for the creation of beautiful books — and especially for books that contain a lot of mathematics”. Beyond maths, its use extends to pretty much any field where you want to add content that is more than simple Roman text - chemistry, non-Latin characters, bibliographies...

The trouble is that it suffers from CompSci disease - which I think I can summarise as being that the assumption is made by most people using it that time spent learning about how to install and use it is time well spent - rather than simply time that is lost from the project that actually needs to be done. Error codes are opaque, software has hidden dependencies which mean that it doesn't work and won't tell you why not, and instructions assume that you will take delight in spending several evenings working through a tutorial gradually getting up to speed - rather than wanting basically to be able to do this NOW. LaTeX devotees in universities will demand that students or supervisees will do stuff in LaTex because "it gives the best results" - this feels like the CompSci equivalent of chucking a non-swimmer into the river above Niagara Falls ...

So what's the best way to do anything with LaTeX? I don't know the best way, but last night, I did manage to find one that works. I installed MiKTeX. Unlike TeXMaker and TeXworks (as a platform on its own - actually MiKTeX invokes TeXworks), it downloaded everything it needed to work straight away. Also, it automatically updated everything. Also, rather than grumbling when it needed something that it couldn't have (extra skills beyond the core functionality), it just went and found the library it needed on the internet. This basically brings LaTeX into the realm of normal computer users rather than computer specialists.

I then spent a while getting to grips with some of the basic instructions. The "Hello World" of LaTex looks like this:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\begin{document}
Hello world!
\end{document}

(Computer guys, do you know how INFURIATING it is when you install a package and even this doesn't work out of the tin???!!!)

Then, with a little more exploring, I came up with:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{chemfig}
\begin{document}
\title{A \LaTeX\ Sampler}
\author{Joe Author}
\maketitle
\section{The first section}
\subsection{The first subsection}
Now is the winter of our discontent\\made glorious summer by this son of York \\ \\
\noindent
\texttt{Here is some teletype text}\\
\textbf{Here is some bold text}\\
\textit{Here is some italic text}\\


\chemfig{C(=[:0]C(-[:60]H)(-[:300]H))(-[:120]H)(-[:240]Cl)}
\begin{thebibliography}{1}
\bibitem {Shakespeare 1604}Shakespeare, W., \textit{Richard III}, Stratford, Reprinted 2016.
\end{thebibliography}
\end{document}
What bits and pieces do we have here? It includes ... how to invoke libraries (chemfig, in this case, for the molecule that it draws!!), how to create and display a title, sections and subsections, how to do bold, italic and fixed fonts, and how to set up a bibliography. I also found a usable online reference for LaTex, at Wikibooks.

Basically, this one post that I have written is what I was not able to find on the internet, which is "How to get up and running with LaTex fast, and have access to the information you need to make more progress with it."