Human beings, and I include footballers in this, sin. This is as the result of our original sin, where we ate fruit from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, on the advice of a talking snake. I learned this in first year theology college, so it must be true.
And therefore “some sort of” assistant referee in football.
https://mega.nz/file/F381ASob#S1FxkLUOSthYGji-soPusmv1Yv4NHKHDD-6fMgrNpHo
Platitude of the Day 
Accuracy and certainty? Meh! who needs it. If we had accuracy and certainty I’d have to give you an accurate and certain definition of “original sin”, and we can’t be having that now can we?
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The world is vague and fuzzy. There are very few sharp boundaries anywhere. We found this out when we became able to zoom in on what we thought were the boundaries, only to find that we couldn’t actually put our finger on it. Red merges into orange; there is no single point at which one becomes the other.
Football is finding exactly this. Offside was simple – you are onside if there are two opposition players or the ball closer to the dead ball line than you when the ball is played. At high speed and with no replays, this is just the split second decision of a linesman, the sense he gets from his experience and training. But which bit of you matters? And which bit of the opposition players? Do shoelaces count? Is it your outer shell electrons, or does it have to be the whole atom?
The quest for certainty has resulted in exactly the opposite. VAR doesn’t remove controversy, it just pushes the confusion to a higher level. Jayne Manfredi is wrong about why it often doesn’t seem to work. It’s not that it is filtered through human perception – it is that it highlights that the rule doesn’t work properly at the boundary, because in reality there is no boundary.
The problem that religious people have is that all their books were written centuries before we were able to see this. So they are stuck with rules and observations that are based on there being rigid distinctions between categories. Lions are lions and tigers are tigers. Life is alive and dead is not. Men are men and women are women, and so on.
The theological gymnastics that religious apologists have to do to justify all this would put Nadia Comaneci to shame. In the grey areas at the edges, they have absolutely no answer. JM apparently revels in this greyness, as do I, but her religion largely does not. They have RULES. They know what a man is, and what a woman is. And in the general scheme of things, they are right. But what do they do with people who have XY chromosomes in their spleen, but their liver is XX? What do they do with people whose genetalia are so indistinct that doctors ask the parents which sex they think the baby should be? And that’s the easy stuff – the physical stuff. What do they do with people who are born psychologically the opposite gender to their physical make-up?
The answer is that they run away from the question, deny the reality of the greyness and hide in the certainty of easy categories. Ignore the boundary. Don’t look. In the end, this might be the right approach for football, which doesn’t really matter. But when what is at the boundary is not a disallowed goal but an actual person trying to live their life and be happy, it does really matter.
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gosh, I’d like to quote some of what you say about boundaries on my own blog
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Feel free
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thanks Steve
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There I was, dead, and waiting to go up to heaven when over the clouds comes the notification that my ascent was being checked by the assistant, St Peter. Apparently, although it appeared that I had led an averagely good life, I might have committed the sin of not praying or prostating myself before my lord and saviour often enough. This was just 200 years after Jesus came down to earth and I’ve now been waiting for the assistant to decide my fate for nearly 1900 years. Apparently, according to the assistant, I can’t go straight up to heaven as we have to wait for Jesus to reappear with his dad and decide on us all one at a time. Where’s the spontaneity? Surely a god can make up its mind quicker than this.
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The wait was never supposed to be thousands of years, Jesus was supposed to return to judge the living and the dead within the lifetime of his followers.
Stonyground.
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Human beings make a mess of things for all sorts of reasons. Most of these are connected with the ways their brains are wired up, which are largely if not entirely outside their control. People of faith, such as Jayne Manfredi, generally pay no attention to neuroscience, but prefer to believe that body and mind (not to mention the ‘soul’) are different and distinct things.
And ignoring what we know about how the brain works enables them to maintain the pernicious fiction that we are all ‘sinners’, that when things go wrong it is because of our ‘sins’, and that there is nothing we can do to put things right except to throw ourselves on the mercy of the Invisible Magic Friend. Mind you, what counts as ‘sin’ is pretty arbitrary. Being gay is still a mortal sin for many of them, even though most gay people have no choice in the matter. Enslaving people, though, is not a sin at all, according to their Bible, and the Church was quite happy to go along with it, up to the point where they were shamed into stopping.
Reasonable laws and ethics are based on human societies and their requirements, not on tales made up by ancient authorities with a completely different worldview. Time to send ‘sin’ to Room 101.
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l tend to agree with Steve. Truth and Reality are asymptotic and science is the only way for us to progress towards them. VAR, Hawkeye, TMO etc are only examples of technology used to assist the endeavour. They are not, and cannot be, infallible. (unlike your average pope!)
Richard W
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