Well, it’s been a pretty rubbish couple of weeks, but amidst the anxiety there are some good things. This week Joe and I chat a bit about comfort. My thoughts were inspired by giving a talk on Sunday on 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 which really describes how we are comforted by God (largely through each other) and how we then have to pass that comfort on. So we live in this virtuous circle of giving and receiving comfort.
Great take on Generative AI and its contempt for the disciplines involved in real creativity.
GenAI, the way it is being sold to us today, is a dead end. They know. They know it’s devastating to the environment. They know it devalues actual human creativity. They know it churns out lies and fabrications. They know it’s being used for massive disinformation campaigns, to build phishing platforms, social networking bots, to inflate news stories, to flood publishers with worthless submissions. But, today, it makes money. Today, it makes a prompt engineer feel like an artist.’
Crikey. We’ve done three hundred episodes of this podcast. Who’d have thought it? Anyway, this week, Joe and I talk about some of the things we’ve learned along the way and, indeed, are still learning. This is my list… What have I learned? That there are a lot of people out there who are in this situation. We're still going and the audience is still growing. So there are a lot more people out there who identify with mid-faith crisis than we imagined.
This is the oldest wooden church in the world and the oldest timber building in Europe. The wooden walls were made of split tree trunks, rammed into the ground, like a palisade. Fifty-one of the original oak ‘planks’ survive. It was probably built about the year 1013 as a resting place for the remains of the martyred King Edmund, and, although the church itself has been altered and adapted over the centuries, the walls of the nave are still the original timbers, charred and weathered with the passage of time.
One of the things Joe and I discussed on this week’s show was redeeming the word ‘religion’, helped by a listener who wrote in that ‘I’ve actually started to use the word ‘religion’ again… At its best, religion and religious communities can teach and empower us to become truly human and leave behind our selfish survival traits.’ I think this is absolutely true. ‘Religion’ is a tarnished word, stained by centuries of abuse, hypocrisy and cruelty.
This week’s episode is all about money. It’s an interview with financial advisor Sian MacInnes FPFS which is all about the difficulties we have in dealing with the subject. Personally I have always felt vulnerable around the issue. I have that internal conflict, which I suspect many writers and artists have, of feeling anxious about money, but at the same time making life choices which don’t guarantee any kind of financial security.
In this week’s episode, Joe and I – helped by some great feedback – talk about what we gain from belonging to a church, and also what we gain by not belonging. The topic was inspired by a talk I heard a friend of mine give. She was born and raised in Nepal, but moved back to Scotland, and so never felt that she really belonged in either place. But now she has come to see that not-belonging gives her a unique and valuable perspective.
Yes, in this episode, Joe and I return – for a bit, anyway – to the Bible, this time discussing how the Bible was compiled and what is meant by inspiration. 2 Timothy 3:16 is usually translated as ‘All scripture is inspired by God’, but the Greek is para graphē theopneustos which means ‘all [the] writings are god-breathed’. First, there’s the issue of what ‘scriptures’ Paul is talking about. The Bible as we have it didn’t exist in Paul’s day.
This week Joe raised the topic of Christian outrage over the Olympics. One of the joys about not really being on social media means that this storm completely passed me by. It was only a couple of days later when I saw a news article about the organisers apologising for it that I realised anyone had got angry. The idea of people being outraged because of a lampoon of an historically inaccurate painting of the last supper seems odd to me.
I’ve been reading a lot of Edward Thomas recently. He is so, so good.
Tall Nettles by Edward Thomas
Tall nettles cover up, as they have done
These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough
Long worn out, and the roller made of stone:
Only the elm butt tops the nettles now.
This corner of the farmyard I like most:
As well as any bloom upon a flower
I like the dust on the nettles, never lost
Except to prove the sweetness of a shower.