Indiana Lily Passmore arrived 21st February 5.30 am weighing in at 6lbs, Two weeks early. Mum and baby came home yesterday but Indiana does not like her moses basket and only seems to sleep on daddys shoulder or mummys arms.Slipstream psp
People Tell Me That I’m Not Pragmatic.
I have a tendency to be a bit stubborn sometimes and not do what people want because I believe that it would be wrong for me to do that particular thing. They usually think that it would be right for me to do that particular thing and tell me that I need to be pragmatic and do it anyway.
So I’d come to think that I wasn’t pragmatic and that perhaps I was dogmatic.
Then I heard someone comment that pragmatism was just another name for hypocrisy! Which I took to mean that a pragmatist often did stuff that he didn’t believe he should.
Well…
Pragmatic – solving problems in a realistic way which suits the present conditions rather than obeying fixed theories, ideas or rules
Whereas dogmatic is about having a dogma or a set of rules.
I tend to think that what we do reflects what we really believe, so if I stick to a particular path then that is a result of what I believe. That belief isn’t necessarily a rules based belief – it isn’t necessarily being dogmatic or following a dogma. Belief can be anarchic and not rules based, it can come from a faith that is alive within you. It also doesn’t mean that I’m not pragmatic.
A pragmatist is really someone who recognises that rules aren’t good enough to determine what you should do (I would say that God is a pragmatist because he has given us the option to know in our hearts what to do, moment by moment, rather than relying on an Old Testament style set of rules).
So a pragmatist can still be someone who does what he believes, they don’t have to be a hypocrite.
So I reckon that, despite feeling strongly about specific things in my life and whether they are right or wrong, I’m actually a pragmatist because my belief doesn’t come from a fixed set of rules, but is a more anarchic belief that comes from faith which is something bigger than can be expressed in a set of rules.
So now I know how to answer people who accuse me of not being a pragmatist!Black Irish video
The snow finally arrived this week in Somerset, unfortunatly it came in the form of paperwork and marking! Whilst it is tempting to try to make snowballs, not sure it would go down too well with the students. Might have thawed through by Monday.Blood and Chocolate hd
On Sunday afternoon my family and I went down to Beer Head (cliffs) to have a look at the beacked container ship MSC Napoli off Branscombe.
From this BBC News item I see that foreign language Bibles are being washed up. As a Gideon (! who’d have thought it eh?) part of me wonders if I should try and procure these items, however there does seem to be a bit of argument about the legality of picking up salvage. I just hope that they won’t be wasted. I’ll keep my ear to the ground (or should that be seabed?) on this one.
After some thought and reading I’d like to post a follow up to this last post on money and debt.
Debt money, which is basically based on an assurance from one person to another that the debt will be paid (you may wish to re-read the above mentioned post) can suffer from a confidence problem.
When you accept a promise from someone you are trusting that it will be kept in the expected manner. However, over history many governments (the largest promiser of IOUs) just attempt to print their way out of trouble, creating more and more ‘IOUs’ (credit notes/cash that doesn’t have intrinsic value) thus making the existing money more and more worthless.
So the promise of efficient money by using promises to repay (debt money) is tempered by the risk that the promise will be undermined.
On the other hand using valuable assets as money is far less risky – what is the risk that an asset that is considered to have worthwhile value will plummet to a tiny fraction of it’s current worth? However, it can happen, asset values do vary. So what kind of asset would you want to bank with – something which is useful perhaps, something which is rare?
Ultimately, it is a speculative choice either way – debt money (promises) or asset money (valuable commodities).
With regards to yesterdays post “Having All in Common” I’m tempted to imagine that money isn’t something that would exist in the full on coming (and here) Kingdom of God. After all isn’t money something that gives us ownership of something, something we use to trade something we own for something someone else owns?
So, does God prefer asset money to debt money? I don’t know! He says don’t owe others stuff, but then he says that we should continue to return the debt of love…
Ah well, maybe the above discussion is irrelevant? Maybe I’ll have to give it some more thought…
Acts 2:44
All the believers were together and had everything in common.
I was thinking for a few moments about this today and I found myself framing this issue with a question:
What is it that worries us about sharing possessions?
I think it is the fear that our contribution will be abused – that our generosity will be taken advantage of, that we will not be able to count on others to be fair and considerate.
In itself, sharing your possessions or having shared possessions is quite a joyous practice. You get a heightened sense of usefulness, a sense of giving, as sense of helping. The sharing is a positive, it is the abuse that is negative.
Why is it that we cannot trust our brothers and sisters, that we cannot rely on them to be considerate? Is this a shortcoming of our relationship with them. Is our fear of having common property simply an indicator about the state of our relationships?
If so, what can be done? I’m challenged to be closer and more involved with the people I call my Christian friends.
These thoughts have sprung my considerations about what is private property and what is ‘common’ property. Are even our labours (perhaps our most personal and private resource) common property in the new Kingdom?
I’ve recently been reading some books by Paulo Coelho including, ‘The Alchemist’ and ‘By the river Piedra I sat down and wept’
I have found his books a great inspiration written from the heart and I would certainly recommend them. The latest book of his I’m reading is called ‘The Zahir’ which is all about love and what it means to follow your heart. Below is a passage from this book on relationships and communication.
“The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don’t talk any more, they don’t sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theatre, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather round a fire and tell stories�
The advent reflections James posted helped me prepare for Christmas and now my thoughts move the the birth of our baby due in March. I am left thinking thinking how do I prepare myself for this event. The practicalities seem to dominate, not least because we are having an extension built on the house, loosing the kitchen for a while, so the house is in chaos. In many ways this disorder provides me with impetus to find peace and solace, yet this is a place of refuge for me rather than a place to explore my feelings, to think how to prepare myself for the birth of our baby, or to confront my inner life and break up my fallow ground. To find the inner reserves to move from the chaos through the place of refuge towards the fallow ground, is a challenge that I will need all three months till March to confront.
This is a post that continues a casual series about debt (here is the previous post).
Most money in circulation today only exists because someone took out a debt from the banking system, which promptly created the money from nothing. The simple way to express this is it is just like giving someone an IOU: If you want to trade with someone and you have nothing you can promise them something in return – so your promise is a debt to the person who gave you something of value in return for your promise. This is the concept of debt money.
Alternatively we can have money that is based on the value of something that is stored away. For example at one stage money used to be issued when you stored gold in a ‘bank’ (a bank being a store where things of value could be kept). Let’s call this ‘banked asset money’ – when you give the money to someone, they effectively become the new owner of the item kept in store.
I’ve commented on the problems of debt – that you become endebted to someone, you owe them and you are therefore controlled to some respect by the need to pay them off. However, most of our money in circulation is based on debt, by holding some money you are either in debt to someone (because the money is a loan) or someone else is (because the money is a loan).
It is my preference to not owe the loan myself, but to hold money that exists because someone else took out a loan and spent it and the money came to me (eventually). Is this a tacit acceptance of debt? Hmmm. I’m not sure that it is, but how about using ‘banked asset money’ where there is no debt at all?
The problem with ‘banked asset money’ is that there are loads of assets sitting in a bank doing nothing! Rather unproductive and inefficient. In this scenario it costs a lot more to have money because of the overheads of storage and the fact that stored stuff doesn’t get very well used.
I just had an email in about gold and the ethical problems of gold production. Much gold is basically stolen from the people of the country that it was mined in and also a lot of pollution is produced to create gold. If you have gold based money you are necessarily causing gold to be mined – as if you mine some gold you can exchange it for money. Using precious things as money tends to stop that material being used for useful purposes as it has an exchange value far in excess of its useful value (value to do something useful).
Most gold spends its time being valuable either as ingots or as jewellery (which has status because of its value) – only a small proportion of gold spends its time being useful – perhaps in electronic goods or dental fillings. (I’m basing this judgment of how gold is used based on this info: http://www.goldsheetlinks.com/production2.htm which states there is probably 3/4 of an ounce of gold per person and I reckon that an average person does not typically use that much gold for utilitarian purposes – I know that I have some electronics, but it won’t have that much gold in – therefore most gold must be used as a store of value instead.)
If gold is used to back money then we are poorer because it reduces the amount of gold being used for more useful purposes that would make us wealthier (in a practical way).
Storing grain instead of gold isn’t an ideal answer for ‘banked asset money’ either as storing grain has costs, unless you happen to be storing it anyway.
So using asset based currencies aren’t necessarily the right answer to the debt question.
To be continued…
I’ve had a couple of people say to me that of course you can give (money) whilst you are in debt, but I’ve kind of had my doubts about whether this is what God would want. The thing is about debt is that we enter an obligation to pay it back even though we don’t know whether we will be able to do so or not (simply because we do not know the future). It occurred to me that it would be good to pay back debt if you are able to do so, because you would be meeting your obligation and it might mean that you don’t default on your debt and fail to meet your obligation.
Also, it’s not even your money to give, really it belongs to the person who lent you money.
So there seemed to me good reason to not give money away whilst you were in debt. But then I was faced with the argument that then we would have a giving crisis in the church and everyone would stop giving. However, today I gave this point some further thought…
… I realised that if you pay off your debt sooner rather than later then you have to repay less money (less interest that is) because of the reduced period over which you were having to pay interest. Thus, over your lifetime, if you did not give whilst you were in debt but rather repaid your debt more quickly, you would be able to give more. You would be giving the lenders less of your money which would mean that you could give more of your money away. So it would appear to be in the interest of all for us to pay off our debts quickly, even if it meant stopping giving whilst we were in debt.
Of course the risk is that if you quickly pay off your debts, therefore ending up with more money you might just spend it on yourself or choose to take out another debt thereby stopping your giving again!
I can’t say that I find voluntarily owing somebody something an overly attractive situation to be in, I can only imagine that it restricts your options in life.Wah-Wah buy