Lord, thank you for all the new life we see in springtime:
the blossom on the trees,
the bulbs shooting up crocuses and daffodils,
the young lambs skipping over the hillsides.
Thank you that these signs of life remind us of the new life
that Jesus made possible when he was raised to newness of life
on Easter Day.
Grant that we might know that springtime in our lives, for Jesus' sake.
Amen.
(Prayer from Michael Botting)
Be present, O merciful Lord
and protect us through the silent hours of this night,
so that we who are wearied
by the changes and chances of this fleeting world,
may repose upon thy eternal changelessness,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen
This Sunday we think of and give thanks for our mothers.
Mothering Sunday also known as Refreshment Sunday and the 4th Sunday of Lent came about in the 19th Century. During the Industrial Revolution the ordinary people were allowed to return home on this Sunday from where they were working so that they could worship at their Mother Church.
Domestic servants were allowed to go home. Simnel cake was baked and taken home as a gift for the servant's own mother and family.
Nowadays we
As a follow up to yesterday's blog:
Energy Efficiency
Better building standards and insulation could make significant cuts in greehouse gases. The Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University has suggested that emissions from the UK's housing stock could be reduced by 60% by 2050, while according to the Carbon Trust, UK business waste £1 billion a year in lost energy.
If industry used efficient motors - ones that only used the exact amount of power needed - this would save th
According to a press release from the Friends of the Earth Mr Brown's Budget set out some helpful steps to combat climate change. It is not enough and in their view it is not enough to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 20% compared to 1990 levels which is the promise in the last three Labour General Election manifestos. In recent years carbon emissions have been rising, and much greater action is needed.
The Chancellor's commitment to an annual carbon report is welcomed but it needs to be
My last blog posting was about good and evil. One of the evils that a pharmacist might encounter, but only rarely in this country, is a fake medicine - a counterfeit. The World Health Organization says there is a growing global epidemic of them.It is pushing for more global co-operation and political commitment against this threat.
Counterfeits are a major hazard in developing countries and are increasingly a problem for the developed world. 781 instances were noted world wide in 2005, 39
Are we fundamentally good, or fundamentally evil or somewhere in between?
All of us see little children as angels, but are they? Well they are certainly selfish. They make such a mess. They are constantly demanding keeping their parents awake at night. They want attention and they bawl their heads off until they get it.
Charles Darwin thought of nature as a jungle - the strong prosper or at least survive, the weak go to the wall.
Well ,what does this prove? Nothing! The newborn
The comments and pm messages I have received on the plan to create better access to Glen Helen, overwhelmingly supportive, especially for disabled people has made me consider their rights. Unfortunately there are those even in this day and age who consider an impaired life as a life of less value. This attitude should be condemned.
The Christian Church will never accept that disabled people have less rights than others.
Pope Benedict XVI recently called on Christians to defend the live
On Friday I was invited as Chairman of the Society for the Preservation of the Manx Countryside & Environment to an illustrated talk from Peter Knowles, Forestry Warden at DAFF. Peter was speaking at a Friends of the Glens meeting at Glen Helen about a project which is about to get under way. It is about improving access in Glen Helen and in time the other Manx Glens for people who have difficulty in getting access to them.
Friends of the Glens is a Registered Charity which encourages
There has been a discussion for a little while on how much money we should spend on Overseas Aid. We are well short of the 0.7% of GDP recommended by organisations such as Christian Aid, Oxfam. But whatever the right and wrongs of this, why should we send any money to those in the Third World? After all you may think charity begins at home and it should stop there! Haven't we got problems at home? Doesn't hospice and all the other charities deserve our first consideration?
Where do you
George Monbiot, the journalist, says that we are all killers and we will continue to kill until we stop flying.
The aviation industry takes the predominant blame for climate change as the fastest growing source of carbon dioxide emissions. The total effect of aircraft emissions is 2.7 times as great as the effect of carbon dioxide alone. The water vapour they produce forms ice crystals in the upper troposphere which trap the earth's heat.
The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, if y
According to Noam Chomsky - Hegemony or Survival, the great biologist, Ernst Mayr of Harvard reflected on the search for extra terrestial intelligence and whether there was any chance of it existing some years ago. He decided the chances were effectively zero.
His view was based on the adaptive value of higher intelligence such as that which humans have and which is peculiar to our intellectual organisation as a species.
Mayr estimated that there had been about 50 billion species since
We are now in the depths of the winter's weather. Snow, sleet, cold are biting into our bodies. But it is not only humans who feel the cold and have a bit of discomfort, cold weather is lethal for many small birds who need their daily bread to survive.
It is one of our duties to feed them if we care for nature. Feeding and protecting them are necessities. Cats are a constant problem in our garden. We have a cat scan but it offers limited protection. Also we have thick evergreen shrubs wit
It happened last Wednesday. The thing we all fear. I switched my laptop on to be informed there was a hitch. Windows xp could not be accessed. Please find your original CD firing up disc and reinstall the program said the message.
Of course I have no original disc. If I ever did have it has long disappeared into some black hole.
I took the computer off to PC Solutions and was told it wouldn't be ready till Monday at the earliest. This was the nightmare scenario as I had to complet
Can knowledge be bad? Or does all knowledge have neutral value?
What is your answer? Probably it will be the latter.
This a question which is particularly relevant these days as scientists expand the frontier of what is known.
They are increasingly likely to go into ethically questionable areas and discover things which could destroy us all.
But is knowledge inherently bad or value-neutral?
How to commit crime, murder , maim. Producing weapons of mass destruction, mutating
A major political event happened on Sunday. The Postive Action Group went public announcing its arrival on the Island's political scene. The aim is to restore trust in the workings of our Parliamentary democracy I believe. I know some of the individuals but I do not have any more information on how they formed and what their aims are other than that which has been sent out by them through the media. Open transparent Government, rigorous financial controls and a system which is fair to all th
50years ago only about 10%-15% of young people in the developed world went to university whereas now it is about 50% although both these figures were and are rather less in the UK. Most of this great expansion has been due to the needs of the economy and the need to compete in a world wide market.
There are those who feel this expansion has been at the expense of standards and the pursuit of excellence. More means less goes their argument. Others reject this and point to better teaching an
These days the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is looked upon with suspicion. It is seen as elitist. How times have changed. Years ago ideas, culture were held up as something to strive for and academics were held in high esteem. Bertrand Russell, C.M.Joad, Julian Huxley, Freddie Ayer were regulars on programmes such as the Brains Trust which had high audience figures.
Today such people are almost ignored. Unless the knowledge acquired has an obvious economic value to the community
Reading the Forums makes you realise that there is a fair amount of election campaigning going on. Anonymous Forum members are getting particularly shirty with each other. You can tell they are potential opponents as the ones who are fighting obviously live in the same area and have expressed an interest in the "Keys". They are enmeshed in "rape and pillage" politics because that is their style - destructive rather than constructive, negative rather than positive. You know the type only to
I spent most of the day at a workshop organised by DOLGE on Climate Change - and how it will affect the IOM. Some 50 individuals representing a wide cross section of the Manx community were present including the Minister for the DOLGE, John Rimmington and also Mrs Clare Christian MLC from the Department.
The meeting was organised by consultants, ACCLIMATISE. The website UKCIP will supply anyone who is interested with details of similar seminars in the UK and the DOLGE website has updates on
I have had a little feed back from yesterday with people enquiring about the history and meaning of Lent so as it is Ash Wednesday I thought I would put a few thoughts down for those of you who want to know more.
Lent is the fast of 40 days before Easter. The first mention of 40 days probably associated with Lent, occurs in the Canons of Nicaea (AD 325). It is thought the custom originated in the prescribed fast of baptismal candidates, and the number 40 was evidently suggested by the 40
As I am writing this it is about to be Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day. On Wednesday - Ash Wednesday - fasting during the 40 days of Lent begins.
Shrove Tuesday comes from the Middle England word "shriven" meaning receiving absolution from sins.
For Anglicans there is a three fold practice for Lent:
give something up
take something up
and read a Lent book.
This year's Lent book recommended by the Archbishop of Canterbury is "Free of Charge" by Miroslav Volf.
Shrove Tuesday
There are many comments these days about the facts that students are taking "easy" subjects at University rather than physics, chemistry, mathematics. Now what is easy to one could be very difficult for someone else. But certainly the figures show a decline in the number of applicants for traditional academic subjects which I believe is serious.
Science is exciting. There are great discoveries to be made. For instance it is expected that biotechnology will produce this century organisms
Are you aware:
If you die tomorrow, the company that you are working for could easily replace you in a matter of days?
But the family you have left behind will feel the loss for the rest of their lives.
We give more of ourselves to work than to our family.
An unwise investment indeed!
Since the Budget I have been giving a few thoughts to our apparent rush for economic success. There is no doubt we are at the mercy of economic forces. We appear to have got ourselves on to a tread mill where there is only one thought - we must have growth to finance the various schemes which this Island has become involved in over the last few years.
We are more than before at the mercy of forces outside our control on the world stage. We have to increase our wealth to maintain living st
