Passions per Heart

The charities I have regularly given to have included Oxfam, Children in Need and Christians Against Poverty [CAP]. Of those, I've only recently been passionate about Oxfam and CAP. Children in Need was one of those instances of being caught in the high street by someone with a clipboard, and after one year I stopped the money going out from my bank account.

I will buy Fairtrade products if they are available, and I was going to buy one of the items anyway. I don't often drop spare change in the plastic collection containers next to shop tills, and I have almost never given spare change to charity reps or homeless people in the street.

There are definately some conflicting items on this list, but I'm thinking here about what I'm passionate about, because that is what usually fuels my decision to act on the variety of good causes available.

Short Story: The 'Rude' Doctor

A man waited in a waiting room, armed with a wallet. He waited because he had a yellow staple stuck in his finger.

A doctor asked him to come into his office, and to explain what the problem was.

As the man walked in, the man vomitted on the waiting room floor, but the doctor politely ignored this.

The man waved his stapled finger in the medical man's face, and by way of explanation tried to describe his gerbil hunting activities as quite normal.

The doctor did not look very concerned. He reached for some pliers and antiseptic.

A scream that should have belonged to a young girl, and a bit more vomit, fell out from the man's lips as the offending piece of yellow stationary was extracted, and then thrown in the bin, by the educated healer.

Faith and Evidence

Any article or video on the web that mentions anything about religion usually has a predictably long thread of comments by users expressing their own opinions. Apparently, people have plenty of views on the subject (which personally, I hardly find surprising!)

One of the ideas that often makes its way onto these mile-long threads goes something along the lines of "Your belief is based on faith, and faith means ignoring any evidence on the subject, hence you, sir, are an idiot."

I disagree with this. I consider faith to be something that, in my experience, usually complements the known evidence. I have found it distinctly rare for a persons faith to go in the opposite direction of available evidence.

Imagine a scale running from top to bottom. At the top of the scale is "I believe this is true", at the bottom is "I believe this is false", and in the middle is "I don't know". People will be born, for most topics, with nothing on that scale. The default position for believing any topical item will be the neutral- the middle- "I don't know".