Categories: uncategorized
Date: 05 October 2007 12:19:07
Apologies to all for my absense over the last week. I decided that I would take a break from all things computer related while I sorted out my new job. I am now back and raring to go.
I'll be starting my new job on a most prospecious day - 5th November. That great day when protestants throughout the UK celebrate the failure of the Gunpowder Plot and the demise of Mr Guido Fawkes and his cronies. Well that's one way of looking at it anyway.
Personally I see it as a good excuse to light fires, burn images of our enemies, whether old or new, and release various aerial and ground explosives. The latter part is my obvious favourite.
I believe in celebrating our history but also to remember that not everything that went before was as perfect as we sometimes remember it to be. The injustices that exist now also existed then and hatred can move down through our lives without us remembering what started it all.
This was brought home to me as I have started reading the story of Paul Rusesabagina, or the Hotel Rawanda man. He shows us how the colonial powers brought devision to the country through non-scientific racial theory and colonial "divide and rule". By highlighting racial differences and inventing a history of migration that never really existed they brought about the divisions that led to generational hatred and, eventually, genocide.
Now I don't believe that we have the right to bear the blame for what was done by our ancestors, only if we carry those policies forward, but we can accept that they were not as wise or humane as they sometimes should have been. It is to easy to look back and judge the actions of others when you know the end result. We were not alive at that time and cannot really understand what brought these things about.
However we do have a duty to try to put those things right afterwards. The problem is that we seldom do; mainly because we are like those who went before. We are to caught up in our lives to thing about the lives of others, unless that life interuppts our own to a great extent.
We supposedly live in Christian socities. When you look around however you see that there is very little Christian in those societies. We are now seen as people who live on "unscientific" and "unproveable" events and beliefs that bear not relation to the science of Reason that is the current vogue. If you can't touch it, smell it or hear it then it can't be real.
Until we find a way to bridge the gap between Reason and Faith then we will continue to live empty, unfilled and selfish lives that take no account of the injustice and suffering around us.