Sheaf Saint

Three Cups of Tea - Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin True account of American climber/philanthropist Greg Mortenson. Having failed to summit K2 in 1993, he lost his guide and wandered way off the trail and into a Pakistan village in the Karakoram mountains. The villagers looked after him and in return for their kindness he promised to return and build a school for the village, and then went on to build 55 new schools in many of the deprived, remote villages in mountains of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border regions. Not got very far into it yet, but it's a very engaging read.

Here is the link to the report I was on about. Shocking stuff.

I read some statistics a while back about just how much food gets thrown out in this country every day, and it's enough to make you despair for the human race that we can throw away so much food when there are people in the world who cannot feed themselves due to shortages. The worst culprits are the supermarkets. If a piece of fruit or veg looks a funny shape then they will chuck it out rather than put it on sale as it will 'spoil the display' if they do. I find this utterly despicable that we can generate so much waste, but then we do now live in a throwaway society. There was a time when if your TV was broken you would take it to the nearest electronics repair shop and get it fixed, but these days it is just so much easier and cheaper to chuck it out and buy a new one.

Maybe the club could identify those responsible on CCTV like they do with troublemakers and then issue banning orders to them. Might make them think twice about doing it again.

19C, this has been a very interesting and enlightening thread so far with some excellent contributions from a lot of posters. why ruin it now with a stupid, pointless, even childish gripe about the thread title? does it really matter? It doesn't alter the content in any way. FWIW, Ponty is right when he says the title might be a bit misleading, given your known stance on the man known to us as Le God, it might have put some people off even reading it in the first place if they thought it was just another of your rants about MLT. Let it go and let's enjoy the debate.

I would suggest that anybody who deliberately tunes in to ITV7 (or whichever channel it's on) to catch up with the latest goings on in the life of this pathetic media-whore, really needs to step back and re-assess the direction in which their life is going. Just my opinion.

Well this is the point. Loathsome creature she may be, but she isn't quite as deserving of pity and ridicule as the utter morons who actually buy cheap rags like Heat magazine to read about her. What's worse is the fact there is now a whole TV show dedicated to her failed popstar ex-husband's desperate attempts to stay in the public eye. Seriously, are there actually people out there whose lives are so empty and meaningless that they feel compelled to watch this drivel? I really despair for the future of mankind sometimes. Reminds me of the 'rise of the idiots' thing in Nathan Barley.

But what if it turns out that the Higgs Bosun and God are in fact one and the same? If, as speculated, the HB particle is actually responsible for creating the universe, is it possible that ancient civilisations knew this and the idea of God being an all-knowing, all-powerful spirit came about through a mis-translation of this knowledge that, like chinese whispers, became more and more distorted the more it was repeated?

You believe in God despite there being no evidence of his existence, and that is entirely your choice, but you make it sound like non-believing is a religion in itself and that it requires faith in the non-existance of God. It doesn't. All it requires is... well, it doesn't require anything other than a choice not to believe in a story that has been told over and over and over again until finally it doesn't in any way resemble the original story - a bit like chinese whispers. That is how I see the bible and the story of Jesus etc...

In fairness to him, there's no way I would bother to sit and type that out if I could copy and paste it from elsewhere. It doesn't invalidate his point.

The Adventure Game Loved this program while I was growing up in the 80s.

Also, and I must acknowledge the musings of the late, great Bill Hicks at this point, why is there no mention of dinosaurs in the bible? If God created the heavens and the earth in six days and on the seventh created man, why is it that the fossil record has proved that there were giant lizards living on this planet millions of years before mankind was even a glint in God's eye? Many extreme religious types argue that the bible is the absolute word of God yet, as demonstrated by my example above, a lot of it has been disproven as our understanding of nature and of the universe in general has improved. People used to believe that earthquakes and volcanoes and other natural disasters were 'the wrath of God' because there was no other explanation available at the time. Now we know differently of course, yet some people still insist that the bible is the absolute word of God when clearly it isn't.

He does have a point though. I have had this debate many times with religious people, and in my experience whenever people challenge their beliefs as being irrational and offer reasons for this, the believers (metaphorically) stick their fingers in their ears and go 'la-la-la'

Just a quick question to the believers among us, one that has always bugged me..... "Jesus died for all our sins", what exactly does this mean? And if we are all God's children, what was so special about Jesus?

Humanism is the way forward.

An interesting debate, and one that has been ongoing for centuries and, no doubt, will continue to be debated for many more centuries to come. Just so everybody is clear on my stance before I continue, I am not a believer in god, and I would probably classify myself as an atheist if I absolutely must pigeon-hole my beliefs. I have had many a debate myself on this subject on other forums, and it always strikes me that the people who vehemently defend christianity, or religion of any kind, tend to be extremely irrational and blinkered when it comes to their own beliefs. There is a guy who I have debated with on another forum who talks in all kinds of riddles about the subject, and when you challenge him on any of the many contradictions in the bible, he always replies with 'God moves in mysterious ways' as if that is all OK and explains everything. His one argument that really got me though was his insistence that to be a christian, you must first accept that we are all sinners in the eyes of god. This statement, to me anyway, throws up all sorts of questions and complications. Firstly, if you believe that God created us all, why then did he create us as sinners? Secondly, why would anybody swear their allegiance to a religion that seeks to impose a sense of inferiority on every one of its members? It is my belief that religion, theistic religion at least, first came about as a way of explaining anything that mankind could not understand, before the advent of scientific method. It was then perpetuated as a way of exercising control over the populace by those with a vested interested in maintaining power over their people. I will never condemn anybody for following God, the bible, or anything associated with the church in that way (although I have met some religious people who talk absolute drivel in my lifetime) because if people find that religion helps them to make sense of the world and they can become happier and healthier from it then that can only be a good thing. But I do take exception to be told by religious types that I must accept Jesus in order to give my life meaning and morality. I am quite capable of following my own moral compass without the need to absorb texts from a 2000-year-old work of fiction. I am a very rational person, and as such I am incapable of allowing myself to be guided unquestionably by religion.

Sorry.

Wrong. They have to arrest you to speak to you. They only charge people once they are pretty sure they have enough evidence to secure a successful conviction.

Stupid comparison really, seeing as the planned invasion of Iraq was not part of their election manifesto. I'm sure if it had been in there then a lot of people would have chosen not to vote for them.

I take your point, but I must disagree. The BNP was founded by a group of people with a history of violence and therefore anybody who joins the BNP, through choice, understands that they will inevitably be seen as guilty by association. You say your wife is Chinese? Well then she is so by an accident of birth, and it is something over which she had no control, therefore it would be completely wrong to tar her with the same brush as Chairman Mao for instance. But people can choose whether or not to associate themselves with political parties like the BNP, and they should therefore understand the consequences if they do. In reality, your comparison cannot be drawn.

There are certain cultures whose interpretation of Islam leads to those human rights abuses, certainly, but the same can be said of any religion the world over. You only need to look at the situation in (christian) Nigeria where the government turn a blind eye to religious ministers branding children as witches and forcing their parents to give them money to have them 'exorcised'. You cannot single out Islam as the only oppressive religion in the world.

My brother was interviewed for a job at the circuit about 8 weeks ago, and he said he didn't think there was any possibility that the track would be ready on time for this race, there was so much left to do. He reckons they must have had construction workers pulling 24-hr shifts over the last month to finish it.

Oooooh, I've been looking forward to this for ages. BoB was quite posibly the greatest TV show ever made and I never tire of watching the DVDs. Any idea when this is going to be shown here in Blighty?

Just a couple of points.... 1. He stabbed the guy to death. Just because the lad had broken into his mother's house, does that mean he deserved to be sumarily executed? Sounds like 'excessive force' to me, which is precisley why he has been charged. 2. What the buggering hell has this got to do with the BNP being on Question Time????

How many of the current teams are based in the UK? Ponty????? It would be an absolute travesty if Ecclestone decided that Britain shouldn't have a race just to satisfy his own ego. On a slightly different note, what does everyone think about Jean Todt being appointed as president of the FIA?