My previous blog post on the immaturity of the evangelical mind was the first post in almost a month, and a lot has happened both in my life and the world over that time.
I’ve been rather busy of late. First up was just over a week’s holiday with my family, to Holland but stopping off in France and Belgium to break up the journey and to see some friends of my parents. Then I went on beach mission for two weeks at Nefyn with Scripture Union and had a great time – hopefully I’ll have more to say on that later.
This week I’ve been recovering and getting on with various projects: designing publicity for the Christian Union‘s Freshers’ Week activities, putting together the Debate page for the freshers’ edition of Quench (I’m the subeditor for the Debate page now, oh yes), working on the script for a new episode of Screwtape to be filmed for a series at Mack this autumn using the wonders of Writely, preparing for Contagious next week, trying to get some writing done, and also working on a secret project I can’t reveal here. Oh yes, and getting distracted by the wonders of Facebook, which is annoyingly addictive.
I missed most of the initial fuss about the alleged bomb plot while on beach mission. Well, hooray to intelligence and police if they’ve stopped an attack, but do the media and authorities really need to whip the country up into a state of fear and panic?
On an entirely unrelated note, it may interest you to know that the government may revive plans to detain people without charge for up to 90 days (Guardian). It also sounds like someone has been watching too many action movies– smuggling the necessary ingredients for a bomb and combining them successfully in the loo would be rather more difficult than you might think given the way the plot has been reported.
One of the tricky things to manage in such times as this is to keep both an open mind and a critical mind, neither falling into blind cynicism (“The Government must have staged it because we all know Governments are EVIL!”) nor blind naivite (“Gosh and golly, we better support everything the Government wants to do because of all those terrorists out to kill us at any moment!”)
The way in which the real story of the shooting of Charles de Menezes turned out to be very different from the first reports coming from the police should give us pause before accepting everything we hear about supposed terror threats uncritically. Contrary to early reports, de Menezes was not wearing a padded jacket, did not run away, nor leap a ticket barrier, and was pinned to the ground at the time when he was shot. Craig Murray, “Britain’s outspoken Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan”, has an interesting piece that gives a rather more skeptical view of events, and I’d recommend watching the news very carefully and critically as these events unfold.