the year that was - violence and bigotry

I just watched the final of 60 minutes, including a montage of clips from the past year. So much antagonism between cultures and beliefs.

I can understand from an anthropological and historical point-of-view that we punish those who don't conform. They damage our community and values. In a time of pure survival this would have been dangerous.. today, our natures are all wrong. So damaging it makes me question the positives of belief, yet I believe religion will ultimately be better than the atheist view - people need something higher. In fact, we deserve it :)

There is no need for cultures to clash in the western world, yet it exists.

However, in resource poor areas (Africa and the mid-east) I can only see this becoming worse.

Why isn't there a religious edict about tolerance of other beliefs??! (And why do I watch TV?)

which is worse - drugs or sex?

I'm deeply disturbed that a man of influence in that arrogant and confused country, the United States, will admit to buying drugs, and not to sex with a man.

If God gave man free will, and you can't use it to find good, then at least use it to cause least harm. In my moral universe, consenting - even paid for - sex is not likely as damaging as drugs.

I believe, literal interpretations of the Bible have caused more damage than good throughout history.

a change is as good as a holiday ;)

I love the new blogger! I'm a sucker for "beta" anything ;) I don't need a holiday right now, but change is always good .. even when it's bad.. kinda like pizza.

Poor blogger and their "unplanned outages".

Isn't it terrible that we let the money managers get away with not paying for core system maintenance - until there is an outage? Systems developers and admins of the world have got to put their foot down - force the "business" to make time and budget for core support, or the business will suffer.

Just because we can't say when, how and what will happen - they force us to back down. We are left sheepishly looking at our hands .. saying quietly that there will come a time when A Bad Thing will happen.

To top it off, we're the ones left feeling guilty when it does happen.