The Pope’s words - pot and kettles and blackness

September 15, 2006 · Filed Under Italy, World News · 7 Comments

Oh dear, the Pope seems to have got himself in trouble with the Muslims over a quotation he chose to use when talking about the historic relationship between Christianity and Islam.

Muslims seem to have got all hot and bothered and the press is throwing lots of coals into the fire. But why all the fuss? Having read the Pope’s words, briefly, it seems that the general point being made is that spreading faith, any faith, through violent means is not on. OK, but I’m not sure the Roman Catholic church really has the right to say this seeing as in the past it most certainly advocated violence in the name of God, though the use of violence was not openly indicated by the Bible, whereas it does seem to be with regards to Islam - however, one could argue that Mohamed did not really mean a sword in the literal sense, but he referred to the commitment with which Muslims should spread the word. Not much different from Christianity. In the centuries leading up to now those advocating Christianity have certainly not followed a bloodless path. Interestingly the Pope makes no reference to the violent means condoned by the Catholic church over the years, or have I missed something. Hence the title of this entry.

In my book blowing people up because they are not the same religion as you is the same as beating up someone because they don’t support the same football team as you. Bloody pointless.

If the religious leaders of the world were really clever, they would find documents which stated that any and all violence against anyone would mean no road to paradise. With no exceptions. Indeed they do not even need the documents. A little bit of intelligent ‘interpretation’ would suffice. Will they do this? Nah. Why not? Not sure. Perhaps they know that humanity is intrinsically violent and that a ban on violence would be utterly ignored, leaving the different religions with lots of egg on their faces.

With hindsight, maybe the Pope should have chosen his words more carefully. Or maybe he secretly likes the idea of the good old days of the crusades all over again. They do say he is super conservative. Frightening thought.

Our little one starts nursery school next week, but we both opted for zero religious education classes, especially seeing as they focus on the Roman Catholic church. I am not against my son becoming religious, but I want him to make his own mind up, at just over three religious education is more indoctrination than education in my opinion. My son can choose whichever religion he wants or choose not to follow any religion if that’s what he wants. I just hope the religion he decides to follow is not football, that’s all. A vain hope in Italy.

Share:

Tags: Italy

Thunderbird and Fastmail.fm

September 15, 2006 · Filed Under Technology and Gadgets · Comment

For e-mailing I use a combination of the desktop client Thunderbird and my email provider, a company called Fastmail.fm which is based in Australia and offers a primarily IMAP based service. IMAP, if you do not know, is an email system which leaves a copy of your mail on a separate server, unlike POP3 which downloads everything to the PC used to access the mail service, if you use an email client, like Thunderbird. In simple terms IMAP means that you can access all your mail from wherever you have web access. This means you can check mails that you have sent, re-download attachments and thus be in more control.

Anyway after saying what I’ve got, how about how Thunderbird and Fastmail work together? Well, the answer is they work very well, until that is you need to open a mail with large attachments on your desktop. In this case Thunderbird slows to a crawl and gets annoying. Luckily I do not receive that many large attachments, so the problem is only intermittently annoying for me. However, I could not recommend my other half the same set-up in her work environment. Her office would grind to a halt as they waited for all the photos they get to download.

As for Fastmail, the service is very powerful if you are technically minded and it’s cheap too, but it has not been too reliable of late, so I could not recommend the service to anyone for the moment, although I shall hang on in there. Fastmail has really annoyed me once and the next time I might up and leave, but, as I mentioned before, the service is low cost and feature rich and the people behind the service are very open and honest and are always upgrading, improving and stabilizing. This give me faith.

Now if only Thunderbird could download Fastmail mails with large attachments good and fast.

Share:

Tags:

Rain, again.

September 15, 2006 · Filed Under Milan · Comment

It’s raining even more heavily, real ‘cats and dogs’ style, today. This means than Milan will flood, it always does. Not that the whole city begins to resemble lake Como, but there will be a series of ‘ponds’ hampering the progress of trams and cars alike. Of course the number of silly little accidents increases massively when it rains and getting anywhere by public transport can be a real pain. There is also a funny transport strike here - from 8.45 to 3.00 and then from 6.00 to the end of service. Although nothing will really move until 4ish even though the strike officially ends its first half at 3. This means that even more cars will be on the roads, which combined with the rain, will triple the chaos. Incidentally, it took my other half an hour to get to work, double the usual time, on account of trams not arriving when they should have done, which is a sure sign of an accident somewhere or other.

As an aside, Milan is one of the few, or possibly only, cities I know that does not have a river running through it, although it is flanked by rivers on both its east and west.

Share: