A necessary correction

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I’ve met a few reasonably well known and/or important people in my time. Most of them are of an authorial persuasion. I have been recognised by Philip Pullman and I’ve sat opposite Terry Pratchett at dinner. Of a non-authorial nature, the great and the good of Northern Ireland used to pass through our dinner parties with monotonous regularity. One I particularly remember included the Northern Ireland Minister and the Chief Constable of the RUC, whose jokes were judged so off colour by Mrs Minister that she threw a wobbly and demanded to be taken home (whereupon Chief Constable apologised profusely to my mother, who said that’s okay and could he possibly finish the joke?).

But all this was as a clanging bell on Saturday when I got to meet Michael Green. Michael Green! One of the greatest Christian apologists of all time! (And no, that doesn’t mean he keeps saying sorry for it.) I was reading his books when I was a kid. I can’t remember anything about them, mind you, but I know they’re there. They’re like the hidden foundations of a mighty building. You don’t need to know what they look like.

And I was bursting with pride, not because of meeting him, but because he came into the church, and he greeted my lovely wife by name, and she introduced him to me.

And then …

He was leading a seminar on the general topic of “how to share your faith without sounding stupid or putting people off”. Well, that might as well have been the title. Someone asks why you’re a believer? He suggested a number of non-jargony, non-judgemental responses. One of which was to cite the fact (his word, not mine) thefact of intelligent design in creation.

Oh, Michael, what went wrong?

You could cite the fact of a widespread perception of intelligent design. That would present no problem. Others may disagree but you’ve got your talking point. And I must hasten to add he’s of an entirely different intellectual order to the Sarah Palin brigade; I don’t see him raising any controversy about whether or not to teach it alongside evolution in science classes.

But, fact? No. It was like he was ticking Richard Dawkins’s boxes. “Something as complex as an eye …” St Dawkins has shown, quite convincingly, in his epistles unto The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable, that actually something as complex as an eye can evolve. And to show that the Blessed Richard isn’t just mouthing theory, St David of Attenborough the other day on TV actually showed examples of animals with light-sensing organs that are, we could say, eyes at different stages of evolution.

My position? Well, we’re working our way through the final series of The West Wing on DVD. To quote Congressman Santos, “I believe in God and I believe he’s intelligent”. Later in the same episode he defines his position with a few well chosen words that wouldn’t be news to any Christian at my church but which apparently takes the American media by storm:

“Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory. It’s a religious belief and our constitution does not allow for the teaching of religion in our public schools…. Evolution is not perfect, It doesn’t answer every question but it is based on scientific facts. Facts that can be predicted, tested and proven. Intelligent Design asks theological questions. I’m sure that many of us would agree that at the beginning of all that begetting something begun. What was that something?”

(quote half-inched from The West Wing wiki)

No, my faith isn’t left in tattered shreds. The Blessed Richard is impeccable on biology but in areas outside his self-taught expertise, including the whole vast arena of theological discourse, he is so gloriously, wonderfully wrong that Mr Green still wins by several thousand points.

I just dock a few.

Banking gestures

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Gordon Brown is considering legal measures to get back some of the £693,000 pension paid to former RBS boss Sir Fred Goodwin.

Strange to say, I hope he doesn’t, or is not able to. This is because my considerable dislike of smugly complacent overpaid not very good bank chiefs is still second to my dislike of politicians who move the goalposts because the headlines tell them to.

Freddie’s considered response to the idea that he should forego some of the pension as a “gesture” is available for public view. He’s agin it, though you’d think that on the salary he’s been paid recently he really should have put a penny or two aside for a rainy day. As he says:

“to voluntarily accept a reduction in a pension entitlement which has been built up over many years and in other employments in addition to RBS, is not warranted.”

Quite. I’m a one-law sort of guy. If someone has benefited because the law was in the wrong place, change the law, don’t come after the benefittee. Even if he is stinkingly rich. One law. If the government finds a legal way of taking some of his £693k off him, they will find a way of denting the monthly fiver I confidently expect to be claiming off them soon after my 85th birthday, or when old age forces me to retire, whichever is sooner. That would be a Bad Thing.

And anyway, who among us (apart from RBS account holders, but I’m not one) doesn’t actually find it screamingly funny? I can’t remember when I first heard the argument that “you’ve got to pay the right sort of salary to find the right sort of people”, but it was a long time ago, way before the present crisis and probably way before the last. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t now. Finally, finally it’s being exposed as the lie it is in such a way that even the politicians are having to accept it. The “right people” got us into this, you dolt. Freddie is the peak of a very large pyramid going all the way back to Thatcher and probably beyond. If this fiasco finally gets it into people’s heads that you pay people what they’re worth, and if they screw up then they’re screwed, then it will be worth every penny.

And will either Gordon Brown, who ravaged our pension accounts, or his illustrious predecessor who got us into an unjust, illegal and unwinnable war, and who between them spent every last penny of our spare cash such that there is none left anywhere, be foregoing the considerable benefits that accrue to an ex-prime minister?

Anyway, I have a solution. Stop me if I’m wrong – it’s possible – but is the basic idea of banking not:

  • you give the bank all your money for safe storage.
  • occasionally you draw some of this money out.
  • but not all of it.
  • so they get to play with the rest – invest, spend, whatever – just as long as any sum you wish to claim is always there on demand.

I’m going to hazard a guess that a large part of the £693k, or the monthly £57.5k, won’t actually be spent. So, if Freddie keeps it in a bog standard checking account at RBS, RBS will still have that money and he’ll still be quids in. Everyone’s a winner.

You’re welcome.

In which English becomes marginally richer

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Proofreading the workbook for a Shibboleth training course has unearthed two typos that really ought to be proper words.

  • Confliguration: configuration that you basically make up as you go along because you don’t know much about it either.
  • Recommendatino: a small suggestion. A bijou recommendationette, if you like.

The book also, with a completely straight face, manages to make the subject sound a lot more interesting than it is.

“After this number has been reached, the child process will die and be respawned.”

Yikes.