A Quiet Watercourse

Happy Easter! Now as a secular non-Christian, I don’t take the Easter story literally. It’s more of an illuminating story as far as I’m concerned, positive, uplifting, but not literally true. So, from my own viewpoint, what message does Easter have for me as a Philosophical Taoist? What can a non-believer derive from a Christian story?

Well, to summarise my understanding of the story, Jesus overcomes death itself and changes things for mankind forever, however he must still ascend to heaven as his time here is done.

The message I get is one of the impermanence of things, all things change and no-one is exempt. Jesus changed things for everyone, people who supported him, even people who weren’t connected. In the Celtic legends, there is the story of a hero who at the time of the crucifixion felt it happen, and was so affected that he drew his sword and hewed down trees till the effort killed him, our actions change things, sometimes for the last people we’d expect!

There is another subtext here, stemming from the Crucifixion, Jesus has to die in order for the changes to happen. This highlights another Taoist theme, that destruction must proceed creation. Change is the creation of a new status quo, but the old order must be destroyed in order to be replaced, ths is true of every change, no exceptions. The death of Jesus is an allegory for that destruction of the old order, his rebirth for the birth of the new order.

Our third theme is his ascension into heaven, this is clearly a message that all things must end. No matter how powerful and important you are, you can’t resist change and you can’t stay on beyond your time. This reminds us to value our time here, whether you accept reincarnation or not, this incarnation is a one off and should be cherished as such, it’ll never come again.

The Easter story then, does have a message for Taoists, but then this simply shows that no matter who you are, there is a rich vein of spiritual wisdom that underpins all our beliefs.

Things are looking interesting if you read the right papers. There was an editorial in the Daily Express on Friday regarding a public library that had refused an Iranian Christian group permission to post flyers about an event they were planning. Of course, no religious notices at all are allowed in libraries and it’s been that way for years.

This outraged the papers editor who chided those involved for forgetting Christianity’s “Special Place” in this country. Not a day before, they were taking fire at the government over a law that banned marriages of convenience. but had failed to ban them in the Church of England as the priests “closely question” the couple. Of course, the law was challenged and beaten on Human Rights grounds.

Now, let’s get this in perspective. The first incident shows an unbiased secular policy working as intended, the second incident could quite easily have been avoided all together if a proper, unbiased secular policy had be in place!

The point that should be made is that a large portion of the UK is non Christian, and the figure gets higher the young the age group. The only sane way forward at this point is a secular government and the seperation of Church and State in Britain!

You can find the BBC/ICM poll on religious denomination here.

I was reading the newspaper the other day and I came across a centre page feature on Acupuncture. It seems to be getting a lot more attention these days, this article focussed on four women who’d failed to concieve via every “conventional” treatment, but who had great success via Acupuncture. Furthermore, in Men’s Health this month they mention research that shows acupuncture might be beneficial for certain types of Cancer!

In an earlier post I briefly touched on science finding out more about Acupuncture. It’s a very odd position to find myself in, escpecially given my views on scientific accuracy, at the moment I feel like science has it pegged up to a point, but there’s more.

It’s as if there’s a whole layer of things hidden away, and science is just starting to maybe peel back the cover and peek inside.

I think things are going to get very interesting as they learn more.

My Google Reader pointed me at an interesting piece of news, a cache of fossils has been found in Ethiopia that fills in a significant link in the Human evolutionary chain.

This simply provides further proof of the fact of Human evolution, and one more nail in the Creationist coffin.

More details can be found here.

I made a post on the Tea House about the Royal Society lecture, the resulting thread made me stop and think.

Philosophical Taoism is about taking careful notice of the world and trying to live as much harmony with it as possible, you can’t allow sacred cows to get in the way. What matters is harmony with the Tao in your situation or peace.

It’s similar with Science, Scientists have to take careful account of reality and attempt to explain it as accurately as possible. Science is a powerful tool for Taoists and one I think we should be taking full advantage of.

I’ve seen the view that we should be tolerant of other beliefs, and I have no problem with that. But what if those beliefs clash with observed reality, if they’re plain wrong, and all the available evidence points against them? Creationism is a belief that so strongly contradicts the available evidence that it’s not even a bad joke, many proponents have used deceit and trickery to promote it, in the UK one millionaire is sneaking it into schools he sponsors via the back door. When questioned in the commons, Tony Blair attempted to distract attention by referring to the overall record of the schools. Even the Prime Minister can’t defend it!

So, if a belief can’t stand up to scrutiny, can’t be promoted on it’s own merits and has to be sneaked in with dirty tricks, what does that say about it? That it’s just plain wrong, and the sooner it’s left behind the better!

Well, there’s been an interestng turn up for the books. Kaspersky Labs has been trumpted about a new virus that infects both Linux and Windows, called Virus.Linux.Bi.A.

Now the interesting thing is that things is purely a supposed proof of concept, no need for such alarm bells yet, though Kaspersky is a Microsoft partner, so on Redmond’s past form who knows?

Now, some caveats:

1. Firstly the code can only run as the local user, with no elevated priviledges, as it would on a Windows system, so the potential damage is limited.
2. For such a thing to work on Linux, the user would have to download and then execute the program, no fancy automatic scripting here.
3. Setting the default file creation permissions to exclude the the ‘x’ bit on any of the octets would help guard against that as well. Obviously it’s not a total cure, with sufficient social engineering, the user could still be conned into running the file.

Admittedly, Linux isn’t perfect and I’ve no doubt that there will eventually be more serious malware. But on a technical level, the O/S doesn’t have half the avenues for potential infection as I hope I’ve helped show above, I know where I’d rather be!

I was thinking about my post on The Dark Side of the Tao the other day. I’d had a conversation recently about the way that a lot of racial minorities are quick enough to claim racism, but also quick enough to perpetrate it against others.

I think that this, among other things, comes down to the inability of our dualistic worldview to deal with the darkness in our nature. This darkness is there is each of us, it can be denied but never destroyed. In dualistic religion and the philosophy, we are supposed to repress our darker impulses and refuse to acknowledge them. I think that the whole belief in a war between good and evil, a “God” and a “Devil” is a huge metaphor for that.

As I’ve opined previously, this repression means that when balance is restored the pressure has built up and the darkness is expressed ferociously. To repress and deny a huge part of our nature is an irresponsible mistake. Once you’re aware of that, it’s easier to see how dangerous this mentality is these days, how much damage and pain it’s causing. Once you know where the darkness comes from, and you’re aware of it, you can redirect it’s energy to assist you in avoiding that sort of behaviour.

For example, religious or racial discrimination. This stems from our tribal past, when to belong to a tribe meant conformity with a set of rituals, beliefs and behaviours. People of other tribes were competitors and were to be distrusted, the tribes became larger and eventually nations replaced tribes, but that mentality remains. Once you’re aware of it, you can redirect it’s energy in an almost Tai Chi like way, thus using it to reinforce a more positive, non-discriminatory mode of behaviour.

It’s worth a try, we need everyone no matter race or creed to work for a more tolerant society. The alternative …. now that path really does lead into the darkness!

Well, this is a big event. Tomorrow night, The Royal Society will launch a high profile counter attack on Creationism by Science.

The lecture will be delivered by Professor Steve Jones a leading genetics expert. You can find details on the Royal Society’s website here. I’ve been looking forward to something like this happening, it’s about time there was a concerted media offensive against this half assed Creationist bullshit. It’s been creeping into the UK by the back door recently, and frankly, it needs to be challenged.

Well, here’s an interesting read, somewhat old, but still of interest!

It’s about UK faith schools, there have been calls for them to stop recieving state funding, but also there are concerns about the influence of fundamentalist school sponsors with agendas and money to burn, who could use their influence to present their own narrow minded points of view to school pupils.

I notice that the Government is claiming that the schools are popular, but statistics can be made to say anything you please, as I’ve demonstrated before. I think we should recall what’s been done over the years to massage and spin the UK’s unemployment figures.

My own view is that faith schools shouldn’t recieve a penny of state funding. The state has to remain neutral and secular, away from religious fundamentalism. This is the whole point of the seperation of church and state thing, but also, sponsored funding should be more tightly controlled and it should be illegal to attach strings to the money.

I’ve been downed with a touch of food poisoning the last day or so, so I must apologise for not updating as usual.

I had a heads up courtesy of my local LUG (Linux User Group) mailing lists on a piece of legislation that our government are trying to push through called the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Bit of a mouthful. So what’s the deal? Nothing less than the end of British parliamentary democracy, that’s what! This bill will give ministers these powers:

• It grants any minister the ability to amend, replace, or repeal existing legislation.
• Ministers can make major changes to the law without Parliament being able to examine them properly.
• The minister involved can amend any existing legislation; nothing is protected. Including the bill itself!
• Ministers could also give the power to pass laws to other individuals, who are not necessarily elected.

The real worry is that this bill is in real danger of becoming law, and the government has rejected any attempts to add safeguards to the paltry one already in place!

You can find out more here at Save Parliament, and UK residents can write to their MPs here at writetothem.com.

I’ve already contacted my local MP to voice my concerns and I strongly urge all UK residents to do likewise!