Also in The Guardian, Charlie Brooker who is usually so spot on, gets caught up in the angry, self regarding world of Richard Dawkins who is on TV this week extolling the virtues of his own ideas Charles Darwin.

Darwin’s theory of evolution was simple, beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring. But because it contradicts the allegorical babblings of a bunch of made-up old books, it’s been under attack since day one. That’s just tough luck for Darwin. If the Bible had contained a passage that claimed gravity is caused by God pulling objects toward the ground with magic invisible threads, we’d still be debating Newton with idiots too.

And that’s the problem right there. I don’t know why anyone would be looking to the Bible for any view on an issue of science, and by the same token why we should consider a scientist to have any authority on any subject outside his chosen field of study.

The Bible is primarily concerned with the relationship between God and man rather than the proposition of a scientific theory for the inner workings of creation. The writers of the Bible are attempting to articulate with ‘the why’ rather than ‘the how’ and it’s this ‘why’ that is central to the life of faith. For them the ‘the how’ is a far less important, as the intended audience are more concerned with being the ‘People of God’ rather than the students of creation. Whilst certainly a big issue in certain quarters, mainly an insecure Christian minority, who build museums to creationism and argue against the existence of dinosaurs, and to fame hungry scientists who make great show of burning spiritual strawmen on an alter to their own desperate thirst for glory, ‘the how’ is by no means the subject of the book and of the christian life in general. But as the ‘journalists’ at the Daily Mail are well aware, controversy is far more effective at selling newspapers than boring things like ‘news’ and for scientific authors few things are better for raising your profile than invoking false conflicts between reason and faith.

It’s a shame that otherwise smart people are drawn into such senseless arguments, repeating Dawkin’s polemic battlecries word-for-word, rather than actually thinking about the complex and for the most part complimentary relationship between science and faith. Both sides of the debate would be far better served realizing the limitations of their respective views. It’s not in anyone’s interest for the church to go wading into scientific debates, where most of the time it has a) no business b) very little reason to feel under threat. Equally when it comes to the realm of personal relations, science has actually very to say about how we should live and the big relational questions, like grace and love and the search for meaning.

Perhaps it’s best left to Albert Einstien to illuminate the way;

For example, a conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.

Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith.

The situation may be expressed by an image: Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Like The Wire, Generation Kill is unstinting in its support of the men on the front line. Like The Wire, this series deplores the bureaucracy that stops the marines doing their job effectively and disdains the decision-makers who abandon them in hostile climes with faulty equipment

Two episodes in and it’s shaping up to be an unexpectedly effective tonic to my post-wire sense of televisual nihilism.

get some!

People buy stuff, but what we all crave are relationships. Payment is an elemental type of relationship. Very primitive, but real.

Thank God that the world isn’t full of people who think as little and talk as much as Mike Batt.

Kevin Kelly brings some common sense to the table.

link

If you could download a loaf of bread free you would. But you can’t, thank God, because otherwise bakers would cease to exist and there would be no bread to download. Then we’d all be dead, and good riddance to us, because we humans are greedy, thieving, conniving bastards, every last one of us.

Hard to argue with a nuanced arguement like that.

I’m stunned that the bar for getting an article on the front page of The Times’ website has been set so woefully low.

Someone should have ’sub-edited’ the whole article straight into a file marked ‘journalistic integrity helps to protect us from idiots’ and never to be heard of again.

Giles Coren vs The Sunday Times Sub-Editors part 2

What with secret theo gigs and those freaky aint it black dudes, there seem to be loads of good parties on at the moment. One that deserves special mention is manny’s celebration of all things 808, nitefreq.

There’s a great line-up, Arthur Baker/808 State/DMX Krew and the artwork is, as you would expect, typically strong. Most of all though (and this isn’t something you can usually say) the best thing about this night is the date.

See you down Jacks a week on Friday.

(more details here)

What’s with the Guardian’s relentless coverage of the final season, I’m getting dangerously close to Wire overload. I need to chill-ax and come back fresh in a year or so, start from scratch, take my time.

When I do, I’ll also be visiting jurgen fauth’s wire linkathon-but right now I just can’t take it.

Whatever happened to the Channel 4 I used to love?

More often than not these days, it feels like I’m watching a series of 5 minute ‘filler items’ from daytime TV, extended into morbidly brainless 30 minute chunks. The fact that I help fund this tripe, via my license fee, is bad enough without having to pay for dastardly, misleading ‘documentaries’ made by bullshit peddling idiots desperately serving their own agendas at the expense of everyone else on the planet.

Thankfully, there are people like George Monbiot around to put them straight.

Critics like me recognise that Channel 4 is entitled to its own opinions. But it is not entitled to its own facts. As a public service broadcaster it does not have the right to manipulate graphs, invent histories, alter scientific evidence or produce a film which, in the words of one of its contributors, was “as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two”

A three part takedown by a man who also knows a thing or two about anger and verbosity.

Part 1/2/3

Talking of Theo, San Miguel have been in touch and apparently he’ll be playing next week as part of their excellent ‘Hidden Depths‘ season of events. The ‘secretsundaze‘ hosted night takes place at the T bar, Shoreditch and is free to get in via a ‘register and get a chance to win’ type thing at the Hidden Depths website.

Should be a great session, if only to see if anyone turns up from PRS
to make sure he’s paying royalties an all those ugly edits of his. There’s a chromeo one in a few weeks as well, so we’ll definitely be checking that out also.

As with all these things, there’s a fine line between corporate sponsorship and having your culture sold back to you as branded lifestyle, but this seems to have the support of some genuine people (not least theo) so it seems reasonable to give the guys the benefit of the doubt.

(oh and it’s free parties, in some great venues, with some serious artists-what’s not to love!)

Underground dance music, which is not controlled by the industry directly, is where we exist, but also have a lot of control, because to get music out we have to start our own labels usually. But the copying goes on here the worst. We don’t have a lot of protection against thieves because their aren’t a lot of lawyers, because there’s usually just enough money for the artists to survive on, unless you helped father the form. There aren’t managers suggesting to artists to do white versions of black songs, but there are white artists with labels doing it on their own. This is one of the few places a thief will try to copy your music, then send it to you calling it a tribute in hopes of you endorsing it. They’ll find the sources of your samples if you use them, and use them verbatim, then try to cash in on your previous successes.

Theo’s music and deejaying, which I love, are quite clearly fed by his radical, uncompromising stance. It’s not just that it sounds different, has a feeling and agenda all of it’s own, but also it comes from a place I don’t know or understand. That’s the attraction (as it’s always been) you are either drawn to the comfort of home and the things you know or in the opposite direction. And if you’re leaving home, you should expect to hear things that you don’t want to and meet people who you disagree with, but can also challenge you to think about things in a different way. Theo’s gonna draw alot of heat from this interview, and perhaps rightly so, alot of people who support the man (financially or otherwise) might feel that they are implicated in the racial conspiracy he sees at the root of the music industry.

Either way, it’s the stance and the attitude that make the man (and so the music) and I would rather be surrounded by a music and culture that challenges and provokes than one that flatters me.

Read the full interview here.

***Further debate and comments including one from the man himself here*****