A Surprising Outbreak of Work

Massive amounts of productivity in the doily sheds, and vastly improved attentiveness at seminars and meditation workshops this evening. The Twitter outage has resulted in a 100% reduction in people tweeting about how other people using social media is putting them off.

It strikes me that Twitter are missing a trick with their Twitter Status site. Surely if they let users leave messages on it? Then maybe reference each other's User IDs? To save over-use of bandwidth they could always restrict messages to 140 characters.

So my only problem now is - how am I going to publicise this post? Myspace?

Doug being brilliant

This is very, very good. Go here.

Downloading my Religion

I've been intrigued by Linda Woodhead's piece on the "dereformation of religion" in the Guraniad. It has attracted the usual plethora of Dawkinian Dinosaurs, of course (unlike the pleasant, friendly and intelligent atheists who occasionally visit these shores).

But I feel she's missed out on the impact that the big Religion-sharing sites are having. Like the peer-to-peer sites of a year or two ago, and the various sites where one can download music and video with little regard for legality - the Religion-sharing sites are undermining the old, corporate religions by enabling people to download Religion without payment or any respect for the central organisations that try to run these faiths.

Let us take Gordon. Gordon is just an ordinary quantity surveyor by day. But at night, thanks to the faith-sharing site "FaithSpottiBookStream", he is able to download megabytes of any belief he chooses. Last Monday, when I spoke to him, he'd just download Jesuitism and was looking forward to educating the masses living in darkness. However on Tuesday he'd managed to install the belief system of a tribe of frog-worshippers dwelling in a remote Amazonian forest, and spent the rest of the working week in a trance caused by licking frog-skins. He dropped me a note on Saturday to let me know he was working on a mash-up of Liberal Anglicanism and Inca religion. That's where you rip the beating heart out of your living sacrifice, while assuring him that he will still be alive and his spirit will be with us "in a very real way".

The Corporate religions, of course, are struggling to know what to do about this. In the same way that video killed the radio star, and  the download is seeing off the CD - what does one do when, instead of making a 200 mile pilgrimage to Walsingham, your potential visitors are downloading the "Catholic Lite" app onto their Android? Especially when you never quite know which of the various belief and behaviour options they're ticking under the "Custom Installation". If the commands and instructions of your denomination are starting to look a bit irksome and your devotions aren't starting so quickly - bloatware, if you will -  there's nothing to stop somebody downloading something open-source like neo-Paganism, and just getting to work with their own development environment.

And then there are the ever-present dangers of malware or software corruption. For didn't even the operating system of this planet suffer early corruption thanks to a Worm? I heard about one poor chap, who was trying to download Buddhism. Unfortunately he'd been suckered into downloading a viral YouTube video at the same time. and now he's terrified he's going to be reincarnated as Rick Astley.

The Study of Mathematicians

Dear Readers, such an exciting day!

Eileen has been using me in her role-playing games as part of the Social Media Pastoral Studies weekend! To do this I had to hide from the group that were on the course, and respond to their comments via a computer in an IM conversation - pretending to be someone on-line who could be engaged with in pastoral encounter.

Why the only computer I could use to fulfil this role was in the attic, I am unsure. Eileen said it was to ensure I did not contaminate the process by being close enough psychically to influence the delegates. But it's rather scary up here, and the Archdruid's brother is at the far side of the attic, restrained only by the chain and the presence of Mrs Rochester, his nurse.

Eileen has just messaged me to tell me that my job is over for the day. Apparently I drove several members of the course into a state of deep despair, but that was what the Archdruid called the "weeding-out process", and she had no problem with that. No, it was later on that I was told I could step down, as I had failed the "Turing Test". I think this may be a bad thing.

So, finding that the attic is locked from the outside again, I have sat up here, studying Sipech's comments on Mathematicians causing all the ills in the world. I have to tread carefully here. Eileen has told me that "all the best people come from Dunstable", so I would not like to risk her wrath in arguing with Sipech. And the good news is that he is right. It is applied mathematicians that have called all the woe in the world - statistics, made-up facts, the systems that drive the Stock Exchange and related commodity-trading systems. Pure mathematics, especially when allied to physics, have only resulted in such relatively benign effects as the nuclear bomb. Other than that, they just help us to explain the universe within a logic-based framework.

Social Media Pastoral Paper

Last night we were pleased to welcome our latest group on the Beaker Social Media Pastoral Course. As the old-fashioned pastoral methods - going to see people, talking to them, going out for a pint with them - decline in our increasingly virtual world, it's important people are in touch with the new ways of doing things.

Ironically, we deprive our course delegates of all Internet and phone access for the period of the course - basically to stop them cheating - and so I can safely give you a sneak preview of the paper they'll be sitting tomorrow morning to earn their certification. Of course, in the world of the Internet the certificates mean absolutely nothing, but hey - at least I've got the course fees.

1. What are the emoticons for:
A) Smile
B) Sad
C) Wink
D) *proffers cup of tea*
E) Sympathy
F) Trying not to look shocked, but failing
G) Enough with the war stories already.
H) Hugs (but chaste, pastoral hugs)
I) *lights a tea light*
J) Sprinkles with holy water.

2. When offering virtual pastoral advice across parish boundaries, whom should a Church of England minister ask for permission? Give your reasons - and not in txt spk.
A) The bishop.
B) The incumbent of the parish the advisee lives in.
C) Because the Internet is world-wide, ever member of clergy in the whole world.

3. When giving advice on-line, if someone gives the opposite advice what should you do?
A) Follow up with the church authorities who agree with you, quoting as appropriate St Paul, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Wesley or that Bono from U2.
B) Engage in a flame-war with the other person who has chipped in with their ill-considered, rash and probably heretical suggestions. If necessary, block/unfriend the person who originally had.a question/problem as their needy bleatings aren't gonna help anybody once battle's commenced.
C) Reflect that someone's struggle with doubt and loss, combined with their partner's unexpected announcement about their sexuality, is probably not best discussed on their Wall.

4. A Local Preacher has an engagement at the other end of the Circuit, when the drought has cut off every road in the county.
A) What equipment might the chapel need to allow her to preach using Tumblr?
B) What technical challenges will they have in the pastoral follow-up and challenges after the service?
C) Just how tempting is that "off" switch going to be?

5. "If you're announcing your church services on Twitter you might as well just declare wholesale war on the neighbouring vicar and put up posters in the Morrison's in their parish". Explain why this view is either (a) totally misguided or (b) completely sensible.or (c) the shape of things to come.

6. Your online friend has "come out". Via the medium of Twitter, either explain (a) why s/he is going to burn if s/he doesn't repent or (b) that we have a loving God who made him/her that way. Do not attempt both in 140 characters.

7. "Trolls are made in God's image too." Try to think of some justification for why this may not be right.

8. "Fitzroy-Russell's Law" states that as the number of people a church minister follows tends to infinity, the proportion of clergy they're following tends to 100%. Try to disprove this in your own online activity.

9. Discuss the uses of Google+. Write no more than 100 words, as we won't bother to read it.

10. One of your congregation's relationship status has gone from "married" to "it's complicated. Why on earth would you want to keep out of it?

11. "In cyberspace nobody can see your dog-collar". What impact should this have on your online behaviour? Especially if your profile says you're the Arch-Bishop of the Western Hemisphere.

12. "If I engage in evangelism on an atheist forum, everyone will be really courteous and at least listen to me."
A) What planet are you living on?
B) Why could I replace "attempt evangelism" with "espouse atheism", and replace "atheist" with "Christian", and yet the question would still stand?

13. Possibly unlike your congregation IRL, why are you surprised that so many people out there are not like you?

14. With the aid of a bucket and the physics describing the conductivity of water - why is Internet Baptism a bad idea, while a Service of the Word might work?

15. "If I start a blog I might become a Famous Christian and people will come to me for advice and I might get invited on speaking tours". Is this a bad motive? And what are the chances?

16. Does pretending to be a loveable cartoon character / historical person / warrior-princess lessen your pastoral effectiveness? What about if your user ID is  "Atilla the Nun?"

17. Why might you want not to accept a "friend" invitation from a member of your church? What might lead you to block them and report them as spam?

18. Is it easier to pray for people you know on-line or those IRL? If so, is this because you don't have to live with them?

Gentle Wisdom

Quick little post to say that Peter Kirk is posting some smashing, thought-provoking stuff at the minute. #thatisall

Three Links

From his garden, Dave of Waiting for the Grey Bus predicts nine things that will disappear in your lifetime. I think I'd disagree with "music", but I can see his point for the rest.

Doug discusses the different historical considerations of the virgin birth and the Resurrection. Good, thoughtful stuff. But I do miss the "clayboy" picture.

Nice photos from Penny.

Margaret Moves

Formerly the proprietor of a blog with all sorts of names including Cats and Pomegranates, Margaret is now blogging at Margaritki. A lovely-looking new Wordpress blog, with additional excellent photos from Margaret.

Lent Link Love

MadPriest brings out a new monthly liturgical resource.

Emma at LLM Calling continues to count her blessings.

Filey Parish does a reverse Britannica by printing off blog-posts for public reading.

E-church blog has a few good links. Also some comments on the funerals with no-one attending. An increasing sign of a society where people don't have kids because they want it all? A sad comment on the breakdown of modern family life? A signal that everyone is too busy? We don't know, because Stuart just leaves us to draw our own conclusions.

The Starkadders decide they can see signs of the end, then change their mind.

Stroppy Rabbit - on the Pagan attitude to same-sex marriage (they're in favour) and the legal ramifications (none whatsoever, as Pagans aren't licensed to conduct different-sex marriages either).

And in a parallel universe, Gurdur on the amazing news that in Alabama, they still don't like different-race marriages. Presumably they don't like different-sex ones either. (Is there a better term than "different sex"? It makes the whole thing a whole lot more exciting sounding than some might want it to).

Dave Walker launches his new website. The one with, erm, not much on it...

Just to Say...

... Stroppy Rabbit is blogging a whole lot of interesting, thoughtful stuff at the mo.

Well worth a look. And if you're a good, old-fashioned, Trinitarian Christian like me, it's good to see things from a different viewpoint occasionally.

The Meteor Storm That Wasn't

I was sitting in the Sitting Room last night, monitoring my Twitter feed last night when the news came in from all over the country - a meteor storm!

To listen to Twitter there were meteors falling like snow all over the country!  I was so excited, Dear Readers, that I ran outside to witness this once-in-a-lifetime event. Archdruid Eileen muttered something about "John Wyndham", looked suspiciously at the Swiss-Cheese Plant, and then went back to her Bridge game.

Dear Readers, I saw not one. Disappointed, I went to bed and then read the news this morning. It would appear there was just the one, high-up, very large meteor - and maybe a few smaller ones. The hundreds of sightings had been just one, seen in many places, reported by many people. My once-in-a-lifetime event will have to be another day.

I am now pondering on the way the Internet changes our perceptions. Once a single meteor fireball, at 9.40 on a February night, would have been seen only by a few shepherds and maybe the odd drunk wandering home. They may have thought God was sending them a message, but after they told their friends about it, the excitement - such as it was - would have been a strictly local thing and after a year or two they would have been referred to as "Moongazer Michael" or somesuch, who reports seeing things falling out of the sky when nobody else does.

But now, a single meteor plus a few companions, by being reported at near-light-speed, gives the impression of showers of rocks falling from space. Only in the cold light of day can we discover that there was just the one. And by that time, some over-excitable members of the Beaker Folk had holed themselves up in the Doily Shed with a year's supply of baked beans and orange juice. Which made Eileen remark that, on the whole, she'd rather face the triffids.

The Martians vs HMS Thunderchild (War of the Worlds) from Wikimedia Commons

One of these days, Dear Readers, mass-rioting will be caused by a Twitter or Facebook rumour that somebody - somewhere - is hoarding all the tins of anchovies in the United Kingdom or something equally strange. Or worldwide reports of the Return of Our Lord will turn out to be someone catching a glimpse of an open-air production of Godspell from the top deck of a bus. We had better bring our sense of irony and cynicism to new levels - difficult, by the way, when you've a romantic, train-spotting personality like my own - and apply it to tweets from people we've never met, and have no way of verifying. In other words, we should give people we have never met the same amount of credence, until their stories are verified, as we do to politicians.

Another Bit of Blog Love

Another new blog on the side bar - although making a repeat appearance - is Holger.

He's started quite well and I'm looking forward to him experimenting with 2-sentence postings on his blog any day now. But loads of other stuff as well.  Go see!

Sewing new Green Patches on old Blogs

A missive arrives from the real world (I expect) which I am glad to pass on, to let you know that the Greenpatches blog has moved to the New Greenpatches blog. Every now and then Green Patches made us the Blog of the Week, and we're not going to let that kind of kindness go unnoticed. So go read.

Hallowed Chaos

Having had our experiments with Fish & Chip Church, Take-away Church and all the rest, it's nice to direct you to a new blog, Hallowed Chaos, by Sheena, who has some practical advice on Hairdressing Church.

Hat-tip to Laura (@layanglicana) for putting me onto this. Laura herself blogs here.

A too-late #FollowFriday

Social Media is a funny thing.

You can pretend to be someone you're not. Develop half a dozen alternative personalities (or at least put them in the public domain without someone coming round with a concerned look). You can exchange theological pleasantries with a mouse, a deceased archbishop or a whelk.

Or you can get to know people from thousands of miles away and whom you'll never meet, such as @MildewPea, who passed, the other day, to the place where the milk never goes in first and it's always a decent blend. She made Twitter a delight, brought frivolity and good nature to a new height. She had a tea trolley called Maud and loved Englishness. It was a delight, when our time zones coincided, to hear her cheery tweetings. And now, suddenly, she's gone. It's surprising that a relationship mediated through electronics can suddenly leave you with such grief, but it does.

Goodbye Milly, and God bless. I'm sure you'll be happy with the eternal wine you'll be sipping now. Though I hope they can find Earl Grey occasionally, or I'm not coming.

Facebook Status Supporting Unicorns

Nobody thinks about unicorns anymore.

Since they were so arbitrarily translated out of the Bibles after the King James Version, people have refused to believe they exist. Jokes have been made about them drowning in the Great Flood - as if a mythical animal dying in a metaphorical Flood were a laughing matter. Well it's not. These mythical animals metaphorically suffered an awful end, and the mere facts that they didn't exist and it didn't happen (or at least not on a worldwide scale and it was embellished for theological reasons) are no reasons to mock.

Will you put this status up on your Facebook page and annoy all your "friends"? At least one of whom is just pretending to be someone you were mates with at school, but doesn't post or interact much - because they're an imposter, and actually they're that boy/girl you used to avoid at all costs and who was thought to spend their spare time torturing moths, and who you secretly feared had a crush on you. And who actually still does.

99% of people won't post any old rubbish on Facebook just because someone they've not seen since before the Berlin Wall came down told them to - but will you?

Not Reading Wikipedia

I've no idea what special day it may be today, as I'm not reading Wikipedia. We can live without them.

That'll teach them to think they're important and we care. They've just used us in their political games. Swines.

---

(with thanks for inspiration to Richard Battersby)

Social Media Hacking Scandal Continues

I'm really embarrassed by this. Fancy me being the latest victim of the social media hacking affair that has engulfed Facebook.

Somebody has posted my photos of Manchester that I took last week. I still can't work out how they got hold of them.

Kate Middleton Pregnant?

I've got no idea. I'm just an Archdruid in a neo-coenobitic community in the English South Midlands. I've spent all day slapping around the face those male members of the community who went into the woods to be "manly" - and who were then terrified by a squirrel and a 21-year-old Assistant Druid in a nylon badger outfit.

But it's a nice way to draw attention to your sad little newspaper, TV programme or blog. Like "Will the Italian Dictatorship lead to a Fall in Cheam House Prices?" - a headline with no commitment to any answer other than "search us". "Do Mobile Phones Cause Bell's Palsy?" - I don't know, but it might draw your attention. "Silvio Berlusconi goes into the 'Celebrity' Jungle?" - plausible, at least. "Could Graham Kendrick be the next 'Kirsty' from Location, Location?"

The answer to that last one is no, of course.

And she's "Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge"

Killing Ghosts with iPhones

Why would ghosts be killed by mobile phones? That's the question we've all been asking. Apart from the important one of whether Luis Suarez is suffering from some kind of astigmatism.

It's not normally something that I worry about. And it's not often I bother to comment on what the Sun says. Normally, like all good Liverpool fans, I boycott the offensive rag, but on this occasion I read the website. And I think that's OK as it means I'm costing them server bandwidth and not buying anything from their advertisers, and I really don't care what Debbie from Dagenham thinks about what appears to be the murder of Colonel Gadaffi. I'm not saying Debbie doesn't have her own views, but I'm not totally sure that the copy next to her bare torso necessarily represents them in all their riches.

But I'm fascinated by this image of the world's electric network. Apart from the fact that the "scientist" who put this together, Felix from Montreal, has just cobbled together a load of stuff from the 'net himself, and remarks that you can't see electric cables from outer space. That doesn't matter. Because he's right - the world is criss-crossed with electricity - electrons surging in all directions, bringing the benefits of fossil-fuel burning to all people that can afford the bill.

But it does show that antipathy to humanity in the mass that some hold. Describes the human "sprawl" - as if  the world being filled with exciting, interesting, questioning, captivating people is some kind of mistake.Yes, I'm personally with those who think that it might be an idea, to lengthen the time human beings can populate this planet, to ensure there's not too many of us at one time. But I wasn't thinking of shrinking the number suddenly - rather gradually reducing, through non-violent means, the number being produced at any one time. People are great. We need lots of them. For as long as possible. And by the way, the population growth suggested by the Sun article is massively, eye-swivellingly, people-hatingly wrong compared to the UN's predictions.

But that's not what I'm really interested in. The minute I saw the idea of an "electric planet", I thought of a report I saw 11 years ago. And it told us that ghost sightings had died off in the 15 years since the widespread use of mobile phones. But then you see the maps of the earth with stuff going off and you think - is it really just the mobiles?

Let's pretend for a moment that ghosts can be perceived. I'm not saying they're objectively real. I'm saying they're perceivable. You can know that something is there. They could be an electrical field, they could be a hallucination (or an hallucination, according to Drayton). They could be the spirits of the dead, unable fully to shuffle off their mortal coil and go to join the choir invisible. Let's just assume you can perceive them. An Anglican vicar of my acquaintance claims he saw a Black Shuck once, but is perfectly prepared to accept it could just have been an Alsatian with a growth hormone imbalance - it just looked like a big ghost dog.

So if there's stuff to perceive - then 30 years ago, walking down a quiet country lane or standing around in a country house, you might have noticed it. It might have been a quiet electromagnetic anomaly, it could have been the effect of a pylon overhead - or it might even have been the subtle smile that told you that a young man or woman (according to choice) was interested in you. And with no iPhone, no Nokia, no Android, you might have noticed it. Today, it could have been rattling chains round your head while telling you about the darkness of the deepest pit of the Inferno, and if you were busy with Angry Birds or telling Twitter that there was some rubbish down the sides of the lane, FWIW, then frankly it would be wasting its time. My theory is that mobile phones didn't kill ghosts - the world was flooded with electromagnetic waves before then - it was our interactions with mobile phones that did. Before our current age of social networking, there was an era of yuppies with phones the size of bricks, shouting loudly into them that the signal wasn't up to much.

No, the difference between 30 years ago and now is that the people who might have noticed ghosts then - pallid, sensitive, needy types - are too busy worrying that they've been snubbed by a Facebook friend they met once in Stow-on-the-Wold Market, or wondering why their cutting remark about the woman who was just on the X-factor wasn't retweeted. They're not alert to the outside world anymore. The Wodewose tells me that every day he leads a troupe of 11 supernatural beings across the pelican crossing at Hockliffe, and nobody ever notices. I've asked him why he takes them all the way down to Hockliffe every morning - costing me diesel money and terrifying Jurgen, who drives the mini-bus - but he tells me something about a Roman legionary he was good mates with.

But my point is clear, if you follow it. We don't notice ghosts, whatever they are. We don't notice subtle inter-personal signals. We don't hear promptings from the Still Small Voice. We're too busy broadcasting our views and needs in all directions. Mobile phones didn't kill ghosts. We did.