Why should men be allowed to be ordained?

Top Ten Reasons Why Men Should Not Be Ordained.

10. A man's place is in the army.

9. For men who have children, their duties might distract them from the responsibilities of being a parent.

8. Their physical build indicates that men are more suited to tasks such as chopping down trees and wrestling mountain lions. It would be "unnatural" for them to do other forms of work.

7. Man was created before woman. It is therefore obvious that man was a prototype. Thus, they represent an experiment, rather than the crowning achievement of creation.

6. Men are too emotional to be priests or pastors. This is easily demonstrated by their conduct at football games and watching basketball tournaments.

5. Some men are handsome; they will distract women worshipers.

4. To be ordained pastor is to nurture the congregation. But this is not a traditional male role. Rather, throughout history, women have been considered to be not only more skilled than men at nurturing, but also more frequently attracted to it. This makes them the obvious choice for ordination.

3. Men are overly prone to violence. No really manly man wants to settle disputes by any means other than by fighting about it. Thus, they would be poor role models, as well as being dangerously unstable in positions of leadership.

2. Men can still be involved in church activities, even without being ordained. They can sweep paths, repair the church roof, and maybe even lead the singing on Father's Day. By confining themselves to such traditional male roles, they can still be vitally important in the life of the Church.

1. In the New Testament account, the person who betrayed Jesus was a man. Thus, his lack of faith and ensuing punishment stands as a symbol of the subordinated position that all men should take.

I found this on Dave's blog (though cannot now find how), where I think he was linking it to maggie dawn's blog, but I have followed it as far as here so far.

Ordained women having wit, wisdom and insight...? Who'd have thought it?

And two posts on my blog in one day. You can tell I have a computing assignment to do urgently, can't you?

For those who may not know, I am in fact a Computer Science student. That means that in exceptional circumstances, when the wind is in the right direction and the moon is full, I am forced (by institutional and societal obligation) to do computing work.

Note: this post may contain the following: irony, satire, sarcasm, hyperbole and/or rubbish. This is usually the case.

Walk...

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Slightly larger elucidation at its source.

I'm stuck somewhere in the whole quandary between the merits of expanding one's horizons, experiencing as much as possible of this wonderful world and preventing a dangerously introspective 'the-world-within-our-borders' view... and the blindingly obvious chronic effects of aeroplanes.

• They are cheap. And being cheap is (or should be) never a good enough reason for anything. But then we always have limits.
• They are fast. But also having/doing everything fast is eroding our life, making us less appreciative of anything, let alone anything we have to go to greater effort to achieve. But we only have so many opportunities.
• They are exciting! Yes, well, nothing wrong with that. Does augment the dismissal of the problems though.
• ...etc

With all this talk of aeroplane pollution, and having a rough figure of cars being a tenth of the emmisions (despite trains being something like a tenth of that again), I feel slightly more willing to think about learning to drive. Doesn't mean I don't still cultivate occasional dreams of a [insert clean fuel here] powered Morris Minor for journeys when walking, cycling or trains are not options.

University Challenge

It was only as a matter of chance... or 'Aberystwyth Chance'... that we went. I heard of this thing to come up with a team in the Union that evening. Not wanting to go alone, I thought Alun would be a likely compatriot. Sadly I couldn't get through to him, and as it was that evening, it was off. So I went to Somerfield.

So did Alun. He produced a flyer for the same thing, and we left Somerfield, headed up to the Union and spent the rest of the evening having a rather pleasant free quiz.

Did I say rather pleasant? I meant extremely competitive, highly charged show-down of the heaving mass of the best brains Aberystwyth intelligentsia can muster... at least 400 of them.

The questions flew. Page references to encyclopoedieas were spouted, entire lists of chemical elements were recounted, ancient philosophers were quoted...

Any or all of the above information may or may not be correct. I may or may not be on the shortlist of the 'Aberystwyth Aces'. Alun may or may not be an extremely humble and/or unique person (Don't read that last comment Alun). The university may or may not yet be proud of its student caliber. The Aberystwyth team may or may not be knocked out in the first level of pre-show selection.

So many unknowns.

Loosing my focus

This weekend I went off to live in a barn on a sheep farm in distant Wales. It was very nice. The reason for this was it being 'Lad's Weekend' with my church. Jonny and I cycled to 36 miles there, and then back again on Sunday afternoon.

We had a good time without the influences of girls, CU or work... all of which were rather refreshing.

The point of my wonderfully puntastic title to this post, is that I managed to poke my manual 35mm camera into funtionality on Friday, and used it all weekend. It had been lying dormant since January when the mirror got stuck and wouldn't take photos (a weakness in most cameras).

Finally, after deciding to give it a forceful prod, it got unstuck and seemed to click up and down happily enough to be worth trying again. I had a slight concern that the mirror doesn't quite go down fully any more, which may mean that the 'image' on which one targets the focus through the view finder is not quite the same as the one which the film gets exposed to. But it was worth a try.

Today I got back my photos from Jessops, and I am now the ambivalent owner of 36 pieces of brightly coloured smudgy paper. A few of them could be classed as 'arty', a couple almost show what they were meant to, but in most cases they are more instruments towards experience.

I'll scan some of them later to show you. Oh, I also got my black and white film developed, which was half way though when the above problems started. It was nice that they hadn't got destroyed in the process. They were quite good (and wonderfully sharply in focus), and importantly included the few I took of my Grandad.

Cistern Trinity

Cistern Trinity
Originally uploaded by redwelly.

I haven't put any of my photos on here for a while, so here we are. This is also a rare indulgence of mine into the world where 'art' is meant to be deep and meaningful.

Meditate. Derive the meaning which strikes a chord with you.

And a prize for anyone who can tell me where this is.

A mug for anything

As a brief aside from pondering the merits of international corporations and watching rather exciting flashy animations of world development statistics on the UNDP website, I thought I'd add another doodle to my online arsenal.

An essay? Good heavens.

To the surprise of some (in fact, almost all who have had the pleasure of hearing me claim it), I don't think that I have ever had occasion to write an essay before. Certainly not an actual, academic document with referenced research and formulated cognition.

But I'm writing one now.

The essay is for the Third World International Politics module which I am taking as a break from Computer Science (my degree subject), and to increase my general learning. I've chosen the essay on underdevelopment and capitalism.

If my usage of vocabulary has become a bit odder than usual, it may be something to do with my use of Dictionary.com and Thesurus.com to increase the impresivitude of my writing.

So far I've got in the words 'propounded' and 'multifarious'. I'm hurtling towards having a significant part of the introduction completed.

I have until next Wednesday, 15 March. If you have any words you think I should include, do let me know. sam ( at ) redwelly dot co dott uk.