And in the Big News today from a Faith Perspective, is their too much technology? The Big Book of Magic Stuff says yes. I say no, or possibly, maybe, occasionally, yes. It all depends really.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_UgjxdZiqeOhvL9u7Fde6O44PPthS7ez/view?usp=sharing
Platitude of the Day 
From: god@heaven.un
To: ProfDavidWilkinson@durham.ac.uk
Hi David
Just a test message here from across the universe.
I had this idea for an electronic communications network on the Earth at least 500 million years ago but those early creepy crawlies and single celled creatures of the Cambrian just couldn’t evolve themselves quick enough to put it into practice.
Being a physicist with knowledge of the length of time that the universe has been around since I created it, you will understand how it took 13.5 billion years to get anything to evolve on Earth to recognise electronics and put my plan into action.
So get out there and spread the word about the wonders and magic of modern technology. But don’t forget to mention those myths that early civilisations wrote about me too; we wouldn’t want people to think that I don’t actually exist.
Yours
Allah
PS No need to save this message. There will be others of your supernatural mindset that I will continue to magically contact in the future to spread my ideas. Not those echinoderms though, bloody useless evolution that was.
Please do not print this email. I am encouraging people to save the planet.
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How should anyone relate to clerics pompously calling themselves Reverend Professor Doctor or in his case Doctor is repeated? I think the titles should be dropped forthwith and they certainly have no bearing on the virtue of what such clerics choose to talk about. It’s a bad habit that took over ar since time in the past and the Church had done little to stop this obsequiousness.
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PaulT has got the measure of Wilkinson’s offering perfectly – and with a level of humour that we never find in TFTD, maybe because generating laughs is at least as skilful as putting together an engaging piece of a serious nature.
What struck me about this was that, even when ignoring the TFTD brief, eschewing any current news story for a topic of his own choosing (50 years of @), Wilkinson still failed to put a convincing faith perspective on together.
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….faith perspective together.
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What you say is so true. No one would think what is proposed in Thought For The Day and outright fakes have given way to these flatulent clerics who weave spiders webs from any old nonsense to catch unaware flies from a witless bored audience the same time every morning.
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Can’t beat Paul’s tour de force! More please!
I suppose it’s not being too pedantic to point out that the Tower of Babel story has nothing to do with the misuse of technology. It’s a just-so story to ‘explain’ why there are so many different languages in the world, given that all humans are supposed to have come from Adam and Eve.
@Jason, I think the Rev Dr Dr Prof business is our host poking gentle fun at the academic pretensions of a typical TftD contributor. As far as I am aware, the title that Wilkinson goes by is simply ‘Rev Professor’.
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“I suppose it’s not being too pedantic to point out that the Tower of Babel story has nothing to do with the misuse of technology. It’s a just-so story to ‘explain’ why there are so many different languages in the world, given that all humans are supposed to have come from Adam and Eve.”
That fable has always puzzled me. Surely a wise and benevolent IMF would want its message to be received and understood by all of its creations – so deliberately seeding confusion and communications breakdowns is a perverse thing to do. It’s bad enough when different people speaking more or less the same language “interpret” (aka cherry-pick) the “definitive word” differently enough to want to slaughter each other – adding different languages to the mix is so patently obvious a bad idea that a cynic might start to disbelieve the story.
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The language thing is often a useful tool for people like Wilkinson (and certainly other of the TFTD squad). They have constantly to work with a BBOMS which only comes to them in translation – very few, I’d suggest, have sufficient grasp of Hebrew or NT Greek to chance an alternative meaning themselves. Instead they compare multiple translations from different eras – many of which vary hugely from the King James text, or the Vulgate (and I doubt that the same crew of people have any Latin either). As a result they can “cherry pick” whichever nuance of translation ties in with their point of view; or equally can discredit some ‘inconvenient’ scriptural passage as being mis-translated. It’s almost funny, the proliferation of BBOMS translations available today – of varying levels of scholarship. I know no TFTD contributor would risk a quote from any of the equally prolific, and sanitised, ‘Children’s’ Bibles, but I can’t help recalling Ricky Gervaise’s brilliant demolition of one such book, which he received as a Sunday School prize. Hilarious.
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The arch-compartmentalist Wilkinson’s apparent MO to make science-y things sound like they sit neatly alongside his piety is to say “….for the glory of God through Jesus Christ” at the end of every other sentence.
I’m sure that gives him tremendous warm, fuzzy feelings, but then, as ever with Wilkinson’s TFTDs, I’m only reminded of Douglas Adams’ quote about the pious having to believe in fairies at the bottom of a garden that is in reality beautiful enough without them.
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