Archive for March, 2006

Got home this morning, did some sleeping, some DVD watching and I have my computers setup and finally got my network up and working again so I can get back spending all my time blogging :D. I still have loads more unpacking to do but I’m sure that can wait till, say, summer.

Ok it’s now gone 2 and I need to be up at 8 at the latest to finish packing. I’ve done a lot tonight (and indeed this afternoon as well) but I’ve left my computers running and some other things I can’t sort out until tomorrow. So I think the best thing I can do now is blog and then sleep.

Today was cool. As I previously mentioned we had lunch in Mine (we refering to myself, Michelle and Sarann, Maths Chris, Graham and George have pretty much disappeared) and then in the evening we went to see V for Vendetta. Well it was just me and Michelle although Sarann turned up with Anne eventually (the movie started at 20:30, trailers finished at 20:50, Sarann arrived at 21:00). It was a pretty good movie, it kept me entertained at least. We then finished off with a drink at The Fenton then me and Michelle went home as she has to be up at 6:45 to get to Doncaster airport by 11:00/11:30 (she’s not sure :p).

I think I’m really going to miss Michelle over Easter. Not that I won’t be missing everyone else but Michelle especially as I think I’m closer to her than any other of my uni friends. Hopefully it will be a good chance to catch up with my pre-uni friends though. It’s going to be a wierd holiday. At Christmas I didn’t really miss uni too much as I was ill for most of it so I was glad to be at home but this time I’m not so sure, I don’t want to go home anyway and with little to do for a month (as I failed to get a job and won’t be doing much revising as I have no motivation) I could see it dragging a little. I like uni.

I would quite like to get some sleep though. The last two weeks have been absolutely mental. It started a week last Monday and since then it’s just been constant almost.

• Monday: we spent the night at Sarann’s baking pizza
• Tuesday: Grant House’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities, got really, really drunk
• Wednesday: Hung over all day, film making society AGM, Battle of the Bands with Oli
• Thursday: A much needed night off
• Friday: another night at Sarann’s as Fran arrived so the four of us sat round drinking
• Saturday: Wendy House. Great night even with losing my coat. Crashed at Michelle’s
• Sunday: Got home at about 6 pm (not having been home since leaving for Wendy House) only to go out again an hour later at most to go to Moorish
• Monday: Another night at Sarann’s, this time baking cookies
• Tuesday: In DEC-10 working on Python until 12:30, we tried to get the take-away people to deliver to the computing lab :p. Then spent a long time debating and generally hanging out with the Christians
• Wednesday: film making society meeting followed by Grill a Christian at the Bod Bar and some more debating afterwards
• Thursday: long day at uni coding followed by helping with a movie shoot. Got to DEC-10 at 10:30 and left at 1:10 am. Got back to Bod at 1:45 and spent an hour debating with the Christians again
• Friday: which is of course tonight, went to the cinema then up till now packing

I think I’ve made my case for the hectic fortnight I have had. It’s different from the end of the first term in that, before Christmas, it was mad for like a week although that week was like up till 5 every night (my earliest night was a 3:30 I think then a lot of 4’s and a 5 or something) whereas this has been pretty sustained.

I think my experiance has been somewhat different this term which is something I would like to blog about as a kind of round-up thing. Oh and I want to blog about the last book I read too. So expect those posts when I get some free time over Easter (which should be fairly soon).

Well, before Easter. I have another 9 weeks but for the moment, it’s my last night. Going to the cinema to see V for Vendetta, I think it’s just myself and Michelle as despite despatching mass invites nobody else has shown any interest in coming. Everyone is really tired by this point I think and a lot of people have already gone home.

I on the otherhand am screwed. I need to go out like now to get to the cinema and I won’t be back until late and yet I still have most of my packing to do. I was packing between getting home after having lunch with Michelle and Sarann in Mine and about 4 then the next thing I remember was waking up in bed at 5:30. Ah well, tomorrow morning and late tonight should be fun.

Still haven’t started packing. It’s getting kind of urgent now. I also still need to get my DVDs back. Just had breakfast which wasn’t bad although now I can’t really be bothered to do anything :p. Ok, right, packing…

I have just done a 19 hour day. I was out at like 8 this morning and it’s now 3 am. I had uni all day (plus we got in a bowling session between lectures :p) then I was shooting a movie with film making society between 6 and 10:30. Followed by myself heading over to DEC-10 until gone 1am to do some coding and general socialising as Michelle and Sarann were still in there.

Finally got the bus back and arrived home at 1:45 to spend an hour debating with the Christians again. It’s fun :D. Although sometimes you feel you are just going round in circles. They probably feel the same way although I try my best not to put forward the same argument twice.

While I have absorbed a lot of what they have said tonight it might take a while for it to be fully processed. Still, that is why I blog. Tonight’s main topic was the parodoxes in God and indeed Christianity as a whole. Such as why did God create us to sin if he hates sin, how can God be all powerful and all loving, and so on.

One of the guys, Adam, said that he was quite happy not fully understanding everything as he knew that he was going to understand it all in the next life. His perspective I guess but it’s one I disagree with. What other subject of study could this viewpoint be applied to? Why should religion consider itself exempt from the normal rules of the search for understanding? Even if a Christian chooses to disregard these I am sure they must be able to see why the non-religious of us do not. Religion bares no special significance to us over any other subject and therefore is subject to the same rational inspection that forms part of the study of any area of knowledge.

The girl I was chatting to, Dot (she was cool in that like me, she would phase out every now and then for brief period to mediate on a specific thought) put forward some interesting arguments, although not particuarly revolutionary she seemed to be more open to her own thoughts than the standard Christian defence “it’s God’s plan.” While I would agree with those who say atheists can often be found to relying on the same arguments, that is because they hold scientific merrit even with someone who is religious (at least as a general rule). The former statement does not without accepting the presumptions of religious doctrine.

Back to the paradoxes of God. One point I do believe is that if God was all powerful he could make everyone perfectly happy. The Christian defence to this is that this would remove free will and God chooses to give us free will. However I don’t see any reason why if he is all powerful he couldn’t give us both perfect happyness and free will. By Adam’s own admission, when he goes to Heaven (hypothetically from my point of view of course) he will both have free will and be perfectly happy.

So yeah, I think that pretty much sums up tonight’s discussion. It’s the last night the CU will be putting something on as everyone is moving out this weekend (well, a lot of people). Indeed, I am too, I am moving out at 9am on Saturday morning and I have yet to start packing so tomorrow is going to be mad. I should probably get some sleep.

I’m thinking the chances of me being able to play MP3s are fairly slim…

MP3 Availability on Linux Distros (Fedora Core, SuSE)
Due to MP3 licensing issues, some distros such as Fedora Core and SuSE may not include MP3 support in the SDL_mixer library. If this is the case you will see the following message when attempting to play an MP3+G track:

pygame.mixer.music.load(self.SoundFileName)
error: Module format not recognized

To rebuild SDL_mixer with MP3 support, you need to install the smpeg-devel package, and download and build SDL_mixer from source.

Just been down to Grill a Christian at Bod Bar. Good fun. I got the questions going although I was a little disappointed by the questions asked by others. I think those sorts of situations are best with the most taxing questions that question something they can’t just quote the Bible from.

For example, questions about whether homosexuality is wrong. Fair question, and you might not know the answer but their point of view is going to be fairly certain and they can back it up with biblical quotes. Whereas my opening question “how do you explain the direction relationship between an increase in education and a decline in religion?” can’t be answered with a simple Bible quote because it’s not about what they believe it’s about whether their beliefs are correct which is the point I think I have been trying to get at in this paragraph.

Out of interest, the answer I was given (at least it seems to me this is what I was told, you never get a straight answer out of a Christian ;)) was that people say in Africa are more religious because they need God more (because they live in poverty and die young, etc). As I explained to Dan in the chat we had afterwards, I don’t believe this is the case because say within our society, a university graduates quality of life is not significantly (if at all) higher than someone who only has a few GCSEs and is less well educated. Yet in terms of the percentage of people that would call themselves religious within our society clearly has a divide between the more and less well educated.

The other question I posed was that if God is both all loving and all powerful, why are people in Hell? Surely he is either all loving and cannot prevent it or he is all powerful and doesn’t want to prevent it. The ideas seem mutally exclusive to me. The answer I was given here differed between the panel. The first answer being that Hell is not in fact a place of eternal suffering but a place in which the person will no longer exist (which I would take over eternal life anyday). The second answer I was given was that although God is loving he is also just (and therefore I guess not all loving).

Quite a debate kicked off surrounded homosexuality although that was of limited interest to me. I’m aware of Christian’s views on homosexuality and while I don’t agree with them, they at least accept that it is a real orientation and just condem the act of homosexuality itself. While I don’t think it’s fair to expect homosexuals to repress their biological instincts and abstain from a relationship, I think the Christian point of view is that they could if they wanted to just like hetrosexuals can abstain from relationships also. It’s a fair point although the basis of this expectation appears to be purely the Bible and there doesn’t seem to be any scientific evidence to back up their claim that homosexuality is wrong.

In conclusion, I would urge people who attend these events not to ask questions about what the Christian doctrine is as these type of questions can easily be Googled to reach a satisfactory answer, but rather question the validity of their beliefs and what evidence they have to support the claims they make. The idea is after all to grill them.

I feel like the next 72 hours of my life are going to be mental. I need to update my websites today and tomorrow within the next 5 hours preferably as tomorrow I start uni at 9 though until 2 and have filming to do at 6. This does give me 4 hours but my Python project needs attention and it’s like a two hour round trip to get back to Bod.

As soon as I’ve finished filming I need to get back to Bod for the final Grant House social of the term which is Bod Bar at like 8:00-8:30 then If afterwards. Then on Friday we are going out to lunch and going to the cinema in the evening. And I haven’t started packing and we get kicked out of Bod at 10 am on Saturday morning.

I really wanted to go to this grill a Christian thing on at Bod Bar tonight too, I still might. I’m torn. Maybe I will. Work can wait. Well, it can’t but I’m going to ignore that fact for now.

I went to DEC-10 to get some Python done tonight (t now occurs to me on re-reading my blog I’ve already blogged about this a few hours ago lol). Myself and Michelle were there until after midnight and I got home about 1. Not too bad, I could get 7 1/2 hours sleep in before I needed to get up.

But I decided to go check out the free refreshments being put on by the Christian Union as religious events and discussions posess some quite strong interest for me. Not that there was massive amounts of discussion but I ended up staying there for like 2 hours. That said, free food :p.

So yeah, I should really get some sleep. I finished reading Sam Harris’s The End of Faith today which I will probably have to make a big post about sometime. I start my new book tomorrow, metaphorical prizes (that means not real ;)) for anyone who can guess correctly what I plan to read next. And in case anyone is tempted to think I am being somehow pulled in, no, it’s not the Bible.

There are so many people here. Ok like a dozen of us, maybe 15 but come on, it’s nearly half past midnight. There could be more people in Eniac. And the reason no new people have come in is that you can’t get in after midnight. So context that is masses of people. If’s definitely the end of term :p.

I’ve been here since 8:45 which I guess is only 4 fours although Michelle has been here since 5. She was catching up on her Java then we were working on Python which has progressed quite well night, I can see things falling into place. I have one majorly complex thing to work out and then I think getting the basics done on the rest of it should be pretty simple. At least most of it should. We might even get it finished on time!