So I’m lurking at home chilling out, now my laptop is back up I’ve upgraded my Ubuntu PPC install to the latest and greatest, and then this pops up during my idle surfing….

Which OS are You?

I definitely take that as a compliment!

I was reading an article a few days ago, one of those “Battle of the sexes, men under siege” sort of things. A decision by the government to extended fertility treatment to lesbian couples and single women, without needing for a male figure in the childs life, had sparked a load of articles in newspapers about the redundancy of the male.

I think what’s redundant is that way of viewing the world. What matters more is what you bring to the party as an individual, not a given gender or race. A good parent can be male or female, what counts more is the kind of role model you are and the quality of your parenting.

It’s the same at work, a good staff member can be any gender or race. What matters are the qualities that the individual brings to their role. These old discriminatory prejudices are a massive negative influence, I hope we as a society can move beyond them.

I got involved in Sport Relief on Saturday night, it was a brilliant experience, I recommend it if you ever get the chance. I joined a large group manning a call centre at work to take calls for Sport Relief, we were part of a 7000 strong nationwide call centre.

Our little part of it in South Birmingham took 3725 calls and processed over £84,000 in donations! As part of it our managers hired an artist to do caricatures of us, you can see a small version of mine as my profile avatar.

Comic Relief is on March 16th 2007, it’s in my diary already!

I’ve started to reread Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author was writing about us having intellectual breadth but not depth, in essence the river runs wide, but not deep. It feels like it’s worse today than ever. There’s more and more to know, or at least so it seems, and a never ending stream of information.

My line of work is IT, and that never stops changing, there’s always more to learn. I’ve found that the only way to cope is to focus on the strictly relevant information, and simply keep the rest as notes. I’ve also been experimenting with mind mapping software, with some success.

I’ve also found you can go a long way by just getting your basics right, without lots of complication. For example with computer security, it’s a very big and complex field, but a bit of attention to your basic setup and a few basic do’s and dont’s and you’re quite well placed without needing a huge breadth of learning. Much easier!

I’ve been thinking about the dualistic mindset very recently. This need to have “Them and Us”, the need for evil. A need for evil? Do we need evil, or is it just the lager talking?

I think some folk do need the concept of evil. They can take the things that make them uncomfortable, that they don’t like, and distance themselves easily. I suppose these things can ideologies, people or organisations. Simply package those things as “evil” and it’s easy to distance yourself.

But what of the Taoist? We don’t do the dualism, we recognise that positive and negative exist in the same person and, like a magnet, you need both poles for it it work. You can’t distance yourself from the things that you think are negative (others may disagree) and you have to accept them. One or two of my earlier entries touched on this and I suppose this is an extension of my thinking there.

We did the two minutes silence at 12:00 for the victims of 7/7. It was strange to hear the whole customer service centre go quiet.

Some would say that the West is reaping the result of decades of bad foreign policy in the Middle East. It’s a fair point, though for my part I believe that their policy of violence is simply not the answer.

The terrorists are not having their desired effect, their violence simply hardens resolve against them and justifies ever more repressive laws and actions. Martin Luther King and Ghandi knew the correct way of going about achieving change in the face of a more powerful regime and violence is never the answer.

Another day, another Times article, they were talking about the Catholic church being troubled by “the creeping secularisation of Europe”. They were using Spain as an example, where many people claim to belong the church but the majority don’t go. The blame for a large part of the decline seems to be laid with the changing role of women, that women are more equal and have much more real power now.

Their religion seems to be partly sustained by keeping women relatively powerless, and this sounds like the same story as the Anglican church during Women’s Lib in the 60’s. You can’t sustain a religion by putting half of the human race into relative servitude, a spiritual path should include everyone as equals, no exceptions.

Times change, the Catholic Church is in the difficult position of all dogmatic religions. Change is very difficult, look at the recent problems in Anglicanism for example. I for one doubt that it will survive in it’s current form in the long term. We’re seeing unprecedented change, that will require a level of change that I don’t think the Vatican can make.

I have to apologise for not posting so much of late, I hope to be a bit more frequent from now on. I was reading the Times the other day and an article highlighted the challenges faced by the Catholic church. Like how to make an increasingly cynical and secular actually give a damn.

I have to admit to being one of the cynics, I mean I’ve found the Greek Orthodox Church to be really not so bad, as I’ve said before. But the Catholic Church I really am cynical about.
It’s interesting though how the Church only starts to change when utterly forced to, though I think this is true of any huge organisation.

It reminds me why Taoists talk of the virtue of the small. Large organisations can have lastability, but are slow to change. In our fast moving modern world, this can be a huge disadvantage. I think we’ll see the Church change, but I can’t help thinking that it won’t be the kind of change they’re thinking of, it may well be one dictated by the watercourse, not the church leaders…..