If I hear one more person moan about "carbon" emissions, I'm going to become so wound up that I'll probably begin to vomit with frustration, or something. I only have a GCSE in Chemistry, but I know this much:

 1. Carbon is the stuff in the middle of your pencil. It's also one of the elements that makes up much of the human body, together with Hydrogen and Oxygen. Diamonds are also a form of Carbon.

2. The evil gas given off by the burning of hydrocarbon fuels is Carbon DIOXIDE. I'll say that again: CARBON DIOXIDE. This is one of the main greenhouse gases. It's also what you exhale every time you breathe out and what plants and trees breathe in.

3. Technically where there is inefficient combustion of a hydrocarbon (i.e. all the time, as there is not enough Oxygen in the atmosphere for more efficient combustion) some Carbon is emitted.

I don't know why it bugs me so much, I think it's partly because I'm a little wary of the pseudo-religious zeal with which people preach about "carbon emissions," especially when they mean "carbon dioxide emissions", which is something very different. It's inaccurate science and lazy journalism, not to mention slightly irritating when you hear people calling for the prosecution of "carbon criminals". (It would of course be very difficult to be accurate and campaign against "carbon dioxide criminals", as every who has ever breathed would be guilty.)

Jim highlights an excellent article from Scotteriology on why it's high time Christians started dissociating themselves from the prosperity Gospel, which in all truthfulness hasn't really got anything to do with the Gospel at all. The article says:

"...it is time to start calling the followers of the prosperity message any name other than Christian. My suggestion is that we call them Mammonians. They are not followers of Christ. They have assumed a set of assumptions from a materialistic society and have projected that onto pieces of the text. They are not the least concerned with the broad range of Scripture or with what Jesus had to say, therefore, we should refuse to call them Christians.

However, they are very interested in Mammon. They want more of him. They think about him, they long for more of him in their life and heart. They even turn to other faiths like Christianity and look through their Scriptures to see if they can find any incantations or rituals to bring more of their god Mammon into their life. They worship and love Mammon; therefore, we should call them what they are: Mammonians.

Secondly, while there has been suggestions to stop calling their movement the “Prosperity Gospel” and to identify it instead as the “Prosperity Message” because it is not the Gospel I suggest we go even further. Let’s call it what it really is: The Prosperity Heresy or The Mammonian Heresy. There is enough confusion for Christians and Non-Christians in our pluralistic, relativistic society without these charlatans being able to run around and identify themselves as Christians.

They are not followers of Christ. They are lovers, worshipers, and disciples of Mammon. We simply must start calling a spade a spade and identifying this heresy for what it is. If you want to be a Mammonian: fine. If the words of Kenneth and Creflo are more important than Jesus: fine. If the life, death and resurrection of Jesus may be mere magic formula to make you healthy, happy, and prosperous before your god Mammon: fine. But let’s stop the confusion and call the religion what it is: Mammonianity."

Back in the day of course you'd deal with such theological deviance by calling a church council to denouncing Copeland & Co as heretics, and then excommunicate them and/or burn them at the stake, but nowadays we put them on the TV. Alas gone are the days when you could be burned alive for disagreeing with Calvin, although to be fair many of his theological descendants have kept the same spirit - if not the same practice - in a great deal of their theological dialogues.

Next: The 2008 Harris Lectures presents "On Fire For God? What has the Church lost by neglecting its tradition of burning to death anyone who remotely disagreed with it?" A two day conference seeking to reimagine medieval religious punishment for the Church's future.

Tags: heresy, theology, prosperity

In my first (and probably last) contribution to the Pivot blogging community (I'm still using Pivot, having decided not to switch to Joomla as it was just too much hassle to convert all my blog entries) I've come up with a way for Pivot users to incorporate social bookmarking into their blogs.

All necessary files and instructions can be downloaded here.

Tags: blogging, css, pivot

Well not quite, but for those who might find some of the text on this website hard to read there is now a facility to change to size of the text on this page according to your needs. The text resizer is in the top right hand corner of the screen above the header.

Update: This should now work properly. It didn't work before because I forgot to upload the file that actually changed the text size. Oops. 

Tags: accessibility, scripts

Our society faces a grave crisis. Far more serious than either the credit crunch (surely "repayment crunch?") or global warming is the gradual increase in the amount of smugness that smug people are beginning to pump into the atmosphere with reckless and carefree abandon. It is estimated that by 2010 the level of irritation caused by smug people will have soared to a record high and that the current astronomically high levels of annoyance may be irreversible. 

Smugness emissions are caused by an increasing number of people who, out of a desire to appear morally superior to everybody else, zealously promote their latest lifestyle choice to anyone who is willing to listen (and many more who are not) in the belief and expectation that a) you actually care and b) they have done something so morally wonderful that you ought to immediately take off your sandals and lay prostrate before them in reverent wonder.

You probably know the kind of person I mean. You pop round to their house for a coffee and a conversation like this takes place:

"Would you like a tea or a coffee?"
"Go on then. Coffee please."
"How do you have your coffee?"
"White, one sugar."
"Ok. The coffee is fair trade by the way."
 

At this point there is short pause while the smugness-emitter waits for you to burst into wild applause: "It's fair trade! Wow! Oh my goodness! You're such a morally upstanding person! Hurrah for you!" I mean seriously, what do they want? A medal?

It seems that such outbursts of pseudo-moral smugness are occuring with ever-increasing frequency. In the wake of the collapse of more traditional moral values, more well-to-do people now invest inordinate amounts of moral worth into various trendy fads in an attempt to attain some kind of moral and social superiority over the less smug members of their social circle.